Maiden Voyages (27 page)

There were a good many authors at the College. Jim Tully came and made an arrogant speech. He was short, ferocious and red-headed, with a very dramatic manner. He brought with him Daniel Hennessy, a newspaper man who had written several good books on hoboes for the Haldeman Julius Little Blue Books. Professor Nels Anderson, author of
The Hobo
, and several other textbooks on sociology, also spoke to us. He had a strong, rugged, purposeful face and a rare way of telling a funny story, but the thing I remember most about him was a certain sweetness and tolerance that showed in his lips and in his voice as he talked of conditions on the road and of the things he and we had done
and were then doing. Professor Edwin Sutherland, author of a splendid book on criminals, also gave us a fine talk.

Besides these men we heard some of the most noted professors and sociologists in America, Professor E. A. Ross, of Madison, Professor E. W. Burgess, of the University of Chicago, and Professor Herbert Blumer, secretary of the American Sociological Society. Professor Blumer was a former college football star, large and dominating in body but with scholarly eyes and quietness of manner.

I am mentioning all these illustrious names to make it quite plain that the hoboes are not a bunch of dumb ignoramuses, and that they have an interest in and capacity for good lectures and for worthwhile intellectual food. Besides having the finest type of teachers, the most profound professors, and the ablest adult educators come to Hobo College, the students themselves, the hoboes, became able to think and talk more clearly. By far the most brilliant teachers and the most inspiring speakers who taught at the College belonged to us and came from the life we knew. One of these was Franklin Jordan, the man who later became “my heart.”

(1897–1974)

from
FAREWELL SPAIN

In retrospect I admire Salamanca and desire to return there, but while I was in the place for a variety of capricious reasons I did not truly appreciate it.

The journey there from Santiago had been a desperate business—occupying from four in the afternoon until seven the next morning. In broiling weather, and with a change of trains and two hours’ delay at Astorga at 2
A
.
M
. However, Spain can’t help being a large place, and complicated cross-country journeys between its provincial towns must be taken philosophically. But on arrival there and at an attractive hotel on the Plaza Mayor, to be coldly assured that there could be no question of coffee or of hot water until after nine o’clock, for some mystic reason for ever withheld—that did not help my never very philosophic temperament towards sympathy with Salamanca. Withal, dejected and
dirty, to have to say a sudden good-bye to a conception which had held my imagination strongly since childhood, I really got off on the wrong foot in Salamanca.

When I was ten and read the
Lay of the Last Minstrel
I took a tenacious liking to the name of the place where Michael Scott got his magic—
Salamanca’s Cave
. This liking stayed with me and brought a specific idea with it, or rather two ideas, a picture and an intention. A picture of a dark, small rainy place of grey stone, where it was practically always night, and where everything was done by stealth and almost as if by sleep-walkers. And an intention to see it. It is the only place which I remember when I was young being absolutely determined to see sometime. God knows why, because the above description of my fantasy, which is as near as I can get to it, strikes me as revolting now, and I wasn’t, I think, overweeningly interested in magicians and their goings-on. But I liked the words “Salamanca’s Cave,” and they made me curious. “Curious” is the
mot juste
, I think—nothing else. The curiosity stayed with me in adult life. So that honestly—I’m not trying to be whimsy-whamsy now—when I at last saw Salamanca I was quite considerably set back, superior though the bright reality is to my dank and silly notion. It was all the more childish of me to be surprised, as, although this town was new to me then, Castile was not, and I ought to have realised that there would be no chance of finding darkness, rain and sleep-walkers in any corner of that alive and vivid region. Still—my brain was not functioning well that morning. It was battered—practically in shreds. For I had travelled for fifteen hours in the company of the Barber of Salamanca and his silent wife and brother-in-law. They were returning from their summer holiday on the coast, and were very kind to us when we boarded the train. Gave us good advice about this and that, and, incidentally, told us to go to our unwelcoming but, as it afterwards proved, very pleasant hotel. (I had been going to go to the “Bull’s Head” where Borrow stayed, and which was listed in my 1932 Spanish Hotel book as good and inexpensive. But this nearly killed the Barber! How did I possibly not know that that hotel had been pulled down last May, and was being rebuilt? But how did I not know? He laughed till the tears flowed.) Anyway the Barber talked all night, and fidgeted and chuckled and talked and talked. All through the long pause
in the canteen at Astorga too—where we leant in strange green lamplight against a wall and waited for very bad coffee; where I remember Mary muttered to me—in a surprising pause of the Barber’s—that the Barber’s brother-in-law was a Picasso harlequin. He had a masked and weary face. The Barber was physically a Sancho Panza but with none of Sancho’s wit and less of his steadiness. I shall remember him for ever. I am tired already now through letting the memory of him become too definite.

Salamanca was his mania. He was just that proud of it he couldn’t say! Not as an ancient university town of fame and beauty—though of course he wouldn’t have a word said against a single stone of it, however old and out of date—No, Sir! But he admired Salamanca as their citizens might admire, say, Omaha, or Carthage, Ill.

Boredom is of two kinds, passive and active. The passive kind tells on one in the end, but the active is immediate agony, and leaves a cicatrice that is liable to throb again if touched in later life. I am rather subject to active boredom—but the scar inflicted by the Barber of Salamanca is one of my worst, and will never be completely insensitive. (It is certainly as bad as that inflicted by two women whom I knew in America fifteen years ago, and which still responds uneasily to my memory of them.) I have sometimes believed that I could see shadows spread under people’s eyes when they were being frantically bored. I have seen faces age and sag under the onslaught of amiable extrovertism—and then I’ve known exactly what was happening in the victims’ agonised heads. Well, the Barber turned night into day that night. He told me—the others were feigning sleep, but I couldn’t because I can’t keep still when I’m in pain—he told me the seating capacity of every restaurant and cinema in Salamanca. He told me the names of all the films which had come to those cinemas since their inception—and his own opinions on them. He told me the names of all the cafés and hotels, of all the doctors, dentists, lawyers, chemists and shoeblacks. He told me everyone’s income, and the make of everyone’s car. He corrected himself, he recanted, he woke his wife to get her ruling on certain statistics, he did sums, he remembered, he recalled, he agreed with himself. He was right—that was so, yes, of course he was right!
Ha, ha! And he began again. In sheer delight he began again. He boasted frightfully without a pause.

That was the night we put down. So that as dark lifted outside from the scene which, with certain parts of Ireland, I believe to be without peer for beauty, as light returned to the golden plain that I had not seen for twelve months and exposed its morning innocence, the stillness of its villages, the peace of its scattered shepherds standing like Gothic saints among their gentle goats—I didn’t care, I couldn’t look.

And when the frantic business was over, when there had been about five sweet minutes of the silence and absence of the Barber, to be told—in the minimum of quiet words, I admit—that for two hours there could be no kind of reviving drink! Is it odd if I decided to hate Salamanca?

Eventually of course there was coffee. A bath, aspirin and sleep. In a lovely bed in a room with a marble floor. So that by afternoon one was able to light a cigarette, stroll on the balcony and look at Salamanca. Unfortunately some facts of the Barber’s about the recent removal of the trees from the Plaza Mayor, and the why and the wherefore of it all, came over one in a muddled rush—you know how nightmares can create a hang-over. But I had myself in hand a bit at last. I refused to bother about the trees. The Plaza is lovely without them, anyhow. It is very wide, and quite square, I think. It is all of a piece, pure seventeenth century, colonnaded on its four sides, and with light, narrow balconies running along the first and second floors. All the houses are of the same height, four storeys—rather low and ample of face. The Town Hall, in the centre of the eastern side, and some other public office exactly facing it on the west, are more decorated than the other façades, but Baroque had laid its young, light hand symmetrically and thoughtfully over the whole square, which is full of Castilian sunlight. It is a most satisfactory example of civic building. A bright and inviting Plaza.

I remembered Borrow’s sneers at the sinister clerics mumbling and plotting together under the colonnades. Those were the dark Carlist days, of course. And these are darker days for Spain, but the clerics seem to be well and truly muzzled now. Not much plotting left for
them to do even here in their centuries-old preserve on which their tradition has impressed so much nobility. Curiously tough and engaging, that bigoted, honest fellow, Borrow. Catholic in all my blood, for years I could not bring myself to read
The Bible in Spain
. The idea of a member of the English Bible Society setting out to sell Bibles to Spain might suggest courage, but there was also too much obtuseness in it to make the record seem worth reading. However, in the end I read and re-read it. It is a shrewd and entertaining book—and yet, as the writer records with a faintly smug simplicity his conversations and friendly negotiations with this bookseller, that professor and the other priest, one has an embarrassing suspicion that, for all his shrewdness and working knowledge of human nature, his sturdy leg was sometimes gravely and unostentatiously pulled. Maybe I’m wrong. Anyway, when he was in Salamanca he had dealings with the Irish priests at the Irish Seminary—and his generous tribute to them, which sweeps him on exuberantly to toast the Irish scene and Irishwomen, comes very sweetly and disarmingly from the self-confident Bible-seller.

And that reminds me of my duty in regard to his book. I don’t often borrow books, but I borrowed Borrow’s
Bible in Spain
, and left it, where it might well feel at home, in a bedroom in Burgos. I borrowed it again—merely to look up something—in London. And it has disappeared again—vanished out of my flat. It really looks as if one of these days I shall have to buy three copies of
The Bible in Spain
.

In spite of the Barber, or perhaps because of him, I did not find the Salamanca cinemas up to much, or the cafés either. Though I suppose the latter were all right. Any café would serve under those colonnades with that sunny square to look out upon. And Salamancans, like all Spaniards, live out of doors, taking incessant leisurely
paseitos
, little strolls. So that except at the siesta hour, there is ample entertainment without going into cinemas. It is a widespread town, built harmoniously outward from the Plaza over the sides of a hardly perceptible hillock. The river Tormes washes past it, flowing west to join the Douro at the Portuguese frontier. All about is the open, austere plain, broken around the city’s skirts and, in some of the squares, by acacia trees and lines of poplars. Almost every façade in Salamanca is beautiful, and the general tone is of buff, or of granite that is almost white. The famous
Gothic House of the Shells seems at first a pretty novelty, but after a day or two one is weary of it. The Cathedral, romanesque-renascence and sandstone, like Santiago, falls very far indeed below the standard set for it by Galicia, for though from far off, from across the river, it can look noble enough with baroque tower and dome, close up its details irritate, and the bright splendours of the interior are quite shocking. There is more than a touch of the Barber’s civic swagger about the inside of his Cathedral. But the big Dominican church of San Estéban is beautiful and beautifully cloistered. And they have a confessional box there—as in many other churches of Castile—where Saint Teresa confessed her sins. And the little church of San Martín is lovely romanesque.