Chapter II

The Charms of Cadiz--Seville-by-the-Sea--Cervantes-Daughters of
Eve--The Ladies who Prayed and the Women who Didn't--Fasting
Monks--Notice to Quit on the Nuns--The Rival Processions--Gutting a
Church--A Disorganized Garrison--Taking it Easy--The Mysterious
"Mr. Crabapple"--The Steamer _Murillo_--An Unsentimental
Navvy--Bandaged Justice--Tricky Ship-Owning--Painting Black White.

THE man who pitched on Cadiz as the site of a city knew what he was about. Without exception it is the most charmingly-located place I ever set foot in. Its white terraces, crowded with white pinnacles, belvederes, and turrets, glistening ninety-nine days out of the hundred in clear sunlight, rise gently out of a green sea necked with foam; the harbour is busy with commerce, crowded with steamers and sailing ships coming and going from the Mediterranean shores, from France, from England, or from the distant countries beyond the Atlantic; the waters around (for Cadiz is built on a peninsula, and peeps of water make the horizon of almost every street) are dotted with fishing craft or scudding curlews; the public squares are everlastingly verdant with the tall fern-palm, the feathery mimosa, the myrtle, and the silvery ash, which only recalls the summer the better for its suggestive appearance of having been recently blown over with dust; the gaze inland is repaid with the sight of hills brown by distance, of sheets of pasture, and pyramidal salt-mounds of creamy grey; and the gaze upwards--to lend a glow to the ravishing picture--is delighted by such a cope of dreamy blue, deep and pure, and unstained by a single cloudlet, as one seldom has the happiness of looking upon in England outside the doors of an exhibition of paintings. The climate is dry and genial, and not so hot as Seville. The Sevillanos know that, and come to Cadiz when the heats make residence in their own city insupportable. Winter is unknown; skating has never been witnessed by Gaditanos, except when exhibited by foreign professors, clad in furs, who glide on rollers over polished floors; and small British boys who are fond of snowballing when they come out here are obliged to pelt each other with oranges to keep their hands in. One enthusiastic traveller compares it to a pearl set in sapphires and emeralds, but adds--lest we should all be running to hug the jewel--there is little art here and less society.

"Letters of exchange are the only belles-lettres." Indeed. Now this is one of those wiseacres who are _in_ a community, but not _of_ it, who materially are present, but can never mentally, so to speak, get themselves inside the skins of the inhabitants. That city cannot be said to be without letters which has its poetic brotherhood, limited though it be, and which reveres the memory of Cervantes, as the memory of Shakespeare is revered in no English seaport. Wiseacre should hie him to Cadiz on the 23rd of April, when the birth of Cervantes is celebrated, for in spite of intestine broils, Spaniards are true to the worship of the author of "Don Quixote," and his no less immortal attendant, whom Gandalin, friend to Amadis of Gaul, affectionately apostrophizes thus:

"Salve! Sancho with the paunch,
Thou most famous squire,
Fortune smiled as Escudero she did dub thee
Tho' Fate insisted 'gainst the world to rub thee.
Fortune gave wit and common-sense,
Philosophy, ambition to aspire;
While Chivalry thy wallet stored,
And led thee harmless through the fire."

With the respect he deserves for this wandering critic and no more, I will take the liberty of saying that there is art, and a great deal of art, in the site of the clean town; and that there is society, and good society, in that forest of spars in the roadstead, and in the fishing and shooting in the neighbourhood. When the Tauchnitz editions have been exhausted, and when the stranger has mastered Cervantes and Lope de Vega, Espronceda, Larra, and Rivas, there is always that book which Dr. Johnson loved, the street, or that lighter literature which Moore sings, "woman's looks," to fall back upon. I am afraid some prudes may be misjudging my character on account of the frequency of my allusions to the sex lately; but I beg them to recollect that this is Andalusia, and that woman is a very important element in the population of Cadiz. She rules the roost, and the courtly Spaniard of the south forgets that there was ever such an undutiful person as Eve. Woman played a remarkable part in the events of the couple of months after the Royal crown was punched out of the middle of the national flag. She is political here, and is not shy of declaring her opinions. Ladies of the better classes of Cadiz are attentive to the duties of their religion; kneeling figures gracefully draped in black may be seen at all hours of the day in the churches during this Lenten season, telling their beads or turning over their missals. Those ladies are Carlist to a man, as Paddy would say; they naturally exert an influence over their husbands, though the influence falls short of making their husbands accompany them to church except on great festivals such as Easter Sunday, or on what may be called occasions of social rendezvous, such as a Requiem service for a deceased friend. The men seem to be of one mind with the French freethinker, who abjured religion himself, or put off thoughts of it till his dying day, but pronounced it necessary for peasants and wholesome for women and children. But _les femmes du peuple_, the fishwives, the labourers' daughters, the bouncing young fruit-sellers, and the like, are not religious in Cadiz. They have been bitten with the revolutionary mania; they are staunch Red Republicans, and have the bump of veneration as flat as the furies that went in procession to Versailles at the period of the Great Revolution, or their great granddaughters who fought on the barricades of the Commune. The nymphs of the pavement sympathize strongly with the Republic likewise; but their ideal of a Republic is not that of Senores Castelar and Figueras. They want bull-fights and distribution of property, and object to all religious confraternities unless based on the principles of "the Monks of the Screw," whose charter-song, written by that wit in wig and gown, Philpot Curran, was of the least ascetic:

"My children, be chaste--till you're tempted;
While sober, be wise and discreet,
And humble your bodies with--fasting,
Whene'er you have nothing to eat."

So long ago as 1834 a sequestration of convents was ordered in Spain, but the Gaditanos never had the courage to enforce the decree till after the revolution that sent Queen Isabella into exile. A few years ago the convent of Barefooted Carmelites on the Plaza de los Descalzados was pulled down; the decree that legalized the act provided an indemnity, but the unfortunate monks who were turned bag and baggage out of their house never got a penny. They have had to humble their bodies with fasting since. For those amongst them who were old or infirm that was a grievance; but for the lusty young fellows who could handle a spade there need not be much pity, for Spain had more of their sort than was good for her. Even at that date the revolutionists of Cadiz had some respect left for the nunneries. But they progressed; the example of Paris was not lost upon them. The ayuntamiento which came into power with the Republic was Federal. Barcelona and Malaga were stirring; the ayuntamiento made up its mind that Cadiz should be as good as its neighbours and show vigour too. The cheapest way to show vigour was to make war on the weak and defenceless, and that was what this enlightened and courageous municipality did. The nuns in the convent of the Candelaria were told that their house and the church adjoining were in a bad state, that they must clear out, and that both should be razed in the interests of public safety. It was not that the presence of ladies devoted to God after their own wishes and the traditions of their creed was offensive to the Republic; no, not by any means. The nuns protested that if their convent and church were in a dangerous condition the proper measure to take was to prop them up, not pull them down. But the blustering heroes of the municipality would not listen to this reasoning; they were too careful of the lives of the citizens, the nuns included; down the edifices must come. The Commune of Paris over again. The ladies of Cadiz, those who pass to and fro, prayer-book in hand, in the streets, and startle the flashing sunshine with their solemn mantillas, were wroth with the municipality. They saw through its designs, and they resolved to defeat them. To the number of some five hundred they formed a procession, and marched four deep to the Town-house to beg of their worships, the civic tyrants, to revoke their order. If the convent and church were in ruins, the ladies were prepared to pay out of their own pockets the expense of all repairs. That procession was a sight to see; there was the beauty, the rank, the fashion, and the worth of the city, in "linked sweetness long drawn out," coiling through the thoroughfares on pious errand. The fair petitioners were dressed as for a _fete_; diamonds sparkled in their hair, and the potent fan, never deserted by the Andalusians, was agitated by five hundred of the smallest of hands in the softest of gloves. But the civic tyrants were more severe than Coriolanus. They were not to be mollified by woman's entreaties, but rightly fearing her charms they fled. When the procession arrived at the Town-house, there was but a solitary intrepid bailie to receive it. They told him their tale. He paid them the usual compliments, kissed their feet in the grand Oriental way individually and collectively, said he would lay their wishes before his colleagues, but that he could give no promise to recall the mandate of the municipality--it was more than he dare undertake to do, and so forth. The long and short of it was, he politely sent them about their business. They came away, working the fans more pettishly than ever, and liquid voices were heard to hiss scornfully that the Republic, which proclaimed respect for all religions and rights, was a lie, for its first thought was to trample on the national religion, and to dispossess an inoffensive corporation of cloistered ladies of their right to then property. Here the first act of the drama ended.

The second was, if anything, more sensational, though infinitely less attractive. The Federals bit their thumbs, and cried:

"Ah, this is the work of the priests!"

So it was; not a doubt of that. The Federals meditated, and this was the fruit of their meditations:

"Let us organize a counter-procession!"

That counter-procession was a sight to see, too; the feature of elegance was conspicuous by its absence, but there was more colour in it. Harridans of seventy crawled after hussies of seventeen; bare arms and bandannas were more noticeable than black veils and fans; the _improbae Gaditanae_, known of old to certain lively satirists, Martial and Juvenal by name, turned out in force. Mayhap it is prejudice, but Republican females, methinks, are rather muscular than good-looking. Still they have influence sometimes, and when they said their say at the Town-house the ladies plainly betrayed how much they dreaded that influence. They wrote to Madrid praying that the municipality should be arrested in its course. Senor Castelar did send a remonstrance; some say he ordered the local authorities not to touch the church or convent, but they laughed at his letter, and contented themselves by reflecting that he was not in possession of the facts--that is, if they reflected at all, which is doubtful.

Act the third was in representation during my stay. I passed the Candelaria one morning. Scaffolding poles were erected in the street alongside in preparation for the demolition of the building, and a party of workmen in the pay of the municipality were engaged gutting the church of its contents, and carting them off to a place of deposit, where they were to be sold by public auction. These workmen looked cheerful over their sacrilege. A waggon was outside the door laden with ornaments ripped from the walls, gilt picture-frames, fragments of altar-rails, and the head of a cherub. Half a dozen rough fellows in guernseys had their shoulders under a block of painted wood-carving. As far as I could make out, it was the effigy of one of the Evangelists. I was refused admittance to the building, but I was told the sacramental plate had been removed with the same indifference. The nuns escaped without insult, thanks to the good offices of some friends outside, who brought up carriages at midnight to the doors of the convent and conveyed them to secret places of safety put at their disposal by the bishop.

The people who committed this mean piece of desecration were all Federal Republicans. They disobeyed orders from Madrid, and would disobey them again. They were as deaf to the commands of Senor Castelar as to the prayers and entreaties of the wives and daughters of respectable fellow-citizens. And all this time that the central authority were defied, artillerymen and linesmen were loitering about the streets of Cadiz. Eventually it was plain they would be disarmed, as they were disarmed at Malaga; and they would not offer serious opposition to the process. Their officers were barely tolerated by them. The Guardia Civil were true to duty, but when the crisis came, what could they do any more than their comrades at Malaga? They were but as a drop of water in a well. Disarmament is not liked by the old soldiers who have money to their credit, but there is a large proportion of mere conscripts in the ranks, and they are glad to jump at the chance of returning home.

Troubles worse than any may yet be in store; meanwhile the sun shines, and Cadiz, like Seville, takes it easy. But there is a bad spirit abroad, and it is growing. A pack of ruffians forcibly entered a mansion at San Lucar, and annexed what was in it in the name of Republican freedom; the "volunteers of liberty" have taken the liberty of breaking into the houses of the consuls at Malaga in search for arms; an excited mob attacked the printing-office of _El Oriente_ at Seville after I left, smashed the type, and threatened to strangle the editor if he brought out the paper again; and the precious municipality of Cadiz has nothing better to do than order that no mourners shall be allowed in future to use religious exercises or emblems, to sing litanies or carry crosses, at the open graves of relatives in the cemeteries.

In the merchants' club (of which I was made free) they were saddened at the disrupted state of society, but took it as kismet, and seemed to think that all would come right in the end, by the interposition of some _Deus ex machina_. But who that God was they could not tell: he was hidden in the womb of Fate. As Cadiz accepted its destiny with equanimity, I accommodated myself to the situation, and did as the natives did. I helped to fly kites from the flat housetops--a favourite pastime of mature manhood here; I opened mild flirtations with the damsels in cigar-shops, and discovered that they were not slow to meet advances; I expended hours every day cheapening a treatise on the mystery of bull-fighting, with accompanying engravings, in vain--its price was above rubies. But my great distraction was a strange character I met at dinner at the house of the British Consul. I did not catch his name at our introduction, so I mentally named him Mr. Crabapple. He was short and stout, had a round wizened face freckled to the fuscous tint of a russedon apple, and was endowed with a voice which had all the husky sonority of a greengrocer's. He was beardless and sandy-haired, and one of those persons whose age is a puzzle to define; he might have been anything between fifteen and five-and-thirty. As he talked of Harrow as if he had left it but yesterday, I was disposed to set him down as a queer public-school boy on vacation, until I was astounded by some self-possessed remark on Jamaica dyewoods. We stopped in the same hotel. One morning he descended the stairs, a sort of dressing-case in hand, and yelled to an urchin at the door:

"Here, you son of a sea-calf, take this down to the waterside for me!"

"Will he understand you?" I said.

"Bound to," Mr. Crabapple replied; "never talk to them any other way, anyhow. 'Tis their business to understand. Ta, ta--deuce of a hurry."

"Where are you going, may I ask?"

"Read the Church Service--rather a bore--Sunday, you know."

The nondescript, then, was a chaplain.

The same evening he returned to the hotel, and on the following morning I saw him again descending the stairs, the same dressing-case in hand. He nodded salute, slung his luggage to the same urchin with the cry, "Hook it, you lubber!" and, turning to me, said, "Ta, ta, sheering off again."

"Where to now?"

"Mediterranean."

"There's no boat to-day."

"There is, though--there's mine;" and he was off.

The supposed chaplain was a stray-away from a novel by Marryat, commanded her Majesty's gunboat _Catapult_, and was at Cadiz on the duty of protecting British interests. At the moment his mission was to carry important despatches to Gibraltar.

My mission to Cadiz was, partly, to ascertain the progress of the inquiry into the case of the _Murillo_ steamer, more than suspected of having run down the _Northfleet_, a vessel laden with railway-iron and navvies, off Dungeness, on the night of the 22nd of January previous. Three hundred lives had been lost on the occasion. I knew something of that wreck, for I had seen and spoken with the survivors in the Sailors' Home at Dover on the following evening. A dazed, stupid lot they were, of an exceedingly low standard of intelligence. The sense of their own rescue had overcome the poignancy of grief. I envied them their stolidity, which I explained to my own mind by the rush of the engulfing waters still swirling and singing knell of sudden doom in their ears.

"Guv'nor," said one clown to me, "I seed my ole 'ooman go down afore my eyes, and I felt that grieved a'most as if I was agoin' down myself, and I chewed a bit o' baccer."

I saw the _Murillo_ lying quietly a little distance off the land--a handsome, shapely craft, fine in the lines, with a sharp stem fashioned like that of a ram. She was painted black, with the exception of a band of pink above the water-line, where she was coated with Peacock's mixture. The British Consul informed me that he understood the inquiry into the guilt of the master was to be carried on _secretly_. He would not be allowed to attend it. Copies of the depositions of the accused, and permission to see them, had also been denied to the agents of the British Government, who applied for them for the purposes of the Board of Trade inquiry. Though Spaniards, in private conversation, own that the _Murillo_ is the criminal ship, they seem, for some unaccountable reason, to be anxious that she should escape the penalty of her wickedness, as if the national honour were concerned, and the national honour would be served by cloaking an offence cruel and mean in itself, and awful in its consequences.

There is a sentence in the Comminations which would keep running in my mind every time I thought of that emigrant ship sent to the bottom off Dungeness--"Cursed is he who smiteth his enemy secretly." But if he who smites his enemy secretly is accursed, what is he who smites his neighbour and then flees away like a coward in the dark? Is he not twice and thrice wicked, and to be branded with malediction deeper still? Such a thing the _Murillo_ steamer did--there could be no manner of doubt about it; every seafaring man and every Spaniard admits her blood-guiltiness; yet there she lies off Puntales, near the Trocadero, calmly expecting soon to be under weigh again with her criminal master and crew on board, with no punishment registered against her or them. The Consul-General of Spain in London wrote to the papers after the loss of the _Northfleet_, saying if this man was the wrongdoer he would be punished, and sent to Ceuta or Tetuan. But he is the wrongdoer, and he will never be sent to Ceuta or Tetuan. The master of the _Murillo_ and the sailors of the watch on the fatal night are in prison, but they will never be brought to serious account. The figure of Justice in these latitudes is true to the sculptor's ideal in one sense: the eyes are bandaged, not that Justice shall be impartial, but that she may not see.

This instance of the _Murillo_ is but one of many, and as it illustrates an artifice of tricky ship-owning, it will be well to state why the _Murillo_ will go scot-free, and may audaciously turn up again in British waters disguised by a few coats of paint, exhibiting a fresh figure-head, and bearing a new name in gilt lettering on her stern.

In the first place, the _Murillo_ belonged not to Spanish so much as English owners. The line of steamers of which she was one was the property of a company of shareholders. The company was anxious that their vessels should fly the Spanish flag, so they made one Don Miguel Styles the nominal head of the firm. This individual was a mere clerk in their office, a man of straw, and at the date of the catastrophe Don Miguel Styles had no more substantial existence than our old friend John Styles: he was dead, and in his grave.

Nextly, Mr. Daniel Macpherson, one of the most eminent merchants in the port of Cadiz and Lloyd's agent, had been served with an instrument claiming damages to the amount of 50,000 pesetas (L2,000), because that he had calumniated the good ship _Murillo_, and caused her prejudice and injury by detaining her a couple of months in the waters of Cadiz. The persons who instituted this action forget that the Spanish courts have no jurisdiction in the matter of libels published in England. And as for the prejudice caused to the vessel, it is incredible that the British Government should be so weak as to wait for letters from Lloyd's agent before opening an inquiry into the deaths of some three hundred of its subjects and the identity of the dastardly scoundrel who was the cause of their deaths, who disabled the ship that held them, and then slunk off, leaving them to the mercy of the midnight sea. That the _Murillo_ was that vessel, even those who maintain that she cannot be proved legally guilty do not attempt to deny. It is true, as they say, that moral certainty is one thing, legal certainty another. But there was seldom a clearer chain of circumstantial evidence pointing to the perpetrator of any crime than that which convicted the _Murillo_ of being the misdemeanant. She was off Dungeness at the hour of the disaster, and she was in contact with a ship; this the imprisoned master admitted in his log. But he alleged that the ship could not have been the _Northfleet_. He said he came into collision with a vessel; that he stood by her for half an hour; that one of her boats put off with some persons on board carrying a lantern; that they went round her examining whether there was anything wrong; and that no call having been made to him for assistance he steamed away. But there was a discrepancy between the entry in his log and that in the log of the engineer. The latter, an Englishman, stated that the engines of the _Murillo_ were backed before the collision, that she went astern afterwards, and then went on ahead. The delay altogether was only for a few minutes. No mention of the half-hour. The engineer had no object in telling a lie. The master of the _Murillo_ had. No other ship was in collision off Dungeness that night. Besides, what meant the order to the _Murillo_ to come on at once to Cadiz if she had been in collision, and not stop at Lisbon, whither she was bound as port of call, if not to get her into limits where justice is notoriously blind and halt? Argument is unnecessary and childish; it was the _Murillo_ which cut down the _Northfleet_. But Spain will never exact retribution for the destruction of the property and the sacrifice of the lives of aliens. Cosas de Espana.