Familiar Spanish Travels | Page 9

purpose, and inquiring with me at the
railroad office into the whole business of circular tickets, and even
those kilometric tickets which the Spanish railroads issue to such
passengers as will have their photographs affixed to them for the
prevention of transference. As it seemed advisable not to go to this
extreme till I got to Madrid, my kind young banker put himself at my
disposal for any other service I could imagine from him; but I searched
myself in vain for any desire, much less necessity, and I parted from
him at the door of his bank with the best possible opinion of the
Basques. I suppose he was a Basque; at any rate, he was blond, which
the Spaniards are mostly not, and the Basques often are. Now I am
sorry, since he was so kind, that I did not get him to read me the
Basque inscription on the front of his bank, which looked exactly like
that on the bank at Bayonne; I should not have understood it, but I
should have known what it sounded like, if it sounded like anything but
Basque.
Everybody in San Sebastian seemed resolved to outdo every other in
kindness. In a shop where we endeavored to explain that we wanted to
get a flat cap which should be both Basque and red, a lady who was
buying herself a hat asked in English if she could help us. When we
gladly answered that she could, she was silent, almost to tears, and it
appeared that in this generous offer of aid she had exhausted her whole
stock of English. Her mortification, her painful surprise, at the strange
catastrophe, was really pitiable, and we hastened to escape from it to a
shop across the street. There instantly a small boy rushed enterprisingly
out and brought back with him a very pretty girl who spoke most of the
little French which has made its way in San Sebastian against the
combined Basque and Spanish, and a cap of the right flatness and
redness was brought. I must not forget, among the pleasures done us by
the place, the pastry cook's shop which advertised in English "Tea at all
Hours," and which at that hour of our afternoon we now found so
opportune, that it seemed almost personally attentive to us as the only
Anglo-Saxon visitors in town. The tea might have been better, but it

was as good as it knew how; and the small boy who came in with his
mother (the Spanish mother seldom fails of the company of a small boy)
in her moments of distraction succeeded in touching with his finger all
the pieces of pastry except those we were eating.

VII
The high aquiline nose which is characteristic of the autochthonic race
abounds in San Sebastian, but we saw no signs of the high temper
which is said to go with it. This, indeed, was known to me chiefly from
my first reading in _Don Quixote,_ of the terrific combat between the
squire of the Biscayan ladies whose carriage the knight of La Mancha
stopped after his engagement with the windmills. In their exchange of
insults incident to the knight's desire that the ladies should go to
Toboso and thank Dulcinea for his delivery of them from the
necromancers he had put to flight in the persons of two Benedictine
monks, "'Get gone,' the squire called, in bad Spanish and worse
Biscayan, 'Get gone, thou knight, and Devil go with thou; or by He
Who me create . . . me kill thee now so sure as me be Biscayan,'" and
when the knight called him an "inconsiderable mortal," and said that if
he were a gentleman he would chastise him: "'What! me no gentleman?'
replied the Biscayan. 'I swear thou be liar as me be Christian. . . . Me
will show thee me be Biscayan, and gentleman by land, gentleman by
sea, gentleman in spite of Devil; and thou lie if thou say the contrary.'"
It is a scene which will have lived in the memory of every reader, and I
recurred to it hopefully but vainly in San Sebastian, where this fiery
threefold gentleman might have lived in his time. It would be
interesting to know how far the Basques speak broken Spanish in a
fashion of their own, which Cervantes tried to represent in the talk of
his Biscayan. Like the Welsh again they strenuously keep their
immemorial language against the inroads of the neighboring speech.
How much they fix it in a modern literature it would be easier to ask
than to say. I suppose there must be Basque newspapers; perhaps there
are Basque novelists, there are notoriously Basque bards who recite
their verses to the peasants, and doubtless there are