Maiden Voyages (28 page)

In the University they show you, preserved now, not used, the lecture-room of Luis de León, and the guide tells the good story, that you already know, but that bears repeating—that the great poet-theologian, editor of Saint Teresa, was arrested by the Inquisition in 1572, and kept a prisoner for four and a half years while the Holy Office tried to trap him into heresy; he was released in 1576 and restored to his chair in Salamanca, and that on the day of his first lecture after his return, when the hall was packed and everyone expected some dramatic piece of self-justification—he took his chair and began: “Gentlemen, as I said in my last lecture …” His lecture-room is very pleasant, whitewashed and luminous, with the narrow worn benches and ledges for note-taking heavily scarred with initials of forgotten theologians. The whole University is attractive, with renascence staircases, sunny courts and whitewashed lecture-halls. And the Irish Residencia, still full of Irish seminarists, is a place of quiet grassy courts and sixteenth-century cloisters.

When I read now in the books of journalists who have come back from the Spanish war of the brave new idea of some of the anti-clericals to save the more beautiful churches and convents from the anarchists—save the structures, that is, letting them have the furniture to burn—and to use them for garages and markets and so on, I am, I confess, very much bewildered. Of course, if there is to be no more praying, if that is done with for ever—then the number of empty museum churches, too beautiful to destroy, which Spain will have on her hands,
will be a very ludicrous burden. But garages, markets! Oh, Heaven, how humourless people can be, how smugly blind to the strong reality behind life’s great expressons! Will they make a dance-hall of Santiago de Compostela? No, no. The thing is not so easy as all that. Young men born yesterday can’t be so ridiculously right when apparently all the centuries have been so wrong. They must think again about what to do with their priceless, emptied structures. Give me an anarchist every time rather than these bright, utilitarian dullards.

But let us leave Salamanca—by the same long and many-arched bridge over which a very famous son of the region departed about four hundred years ago on the first of his cynical adventures—as a blind man’s guide. Lazarillo de Tormes, better known to modern Spaniards, who really know the comic characters of their literature, than the great Luis de León. Lazarillo’s story, written anonymously, appeared in 1554 and was the first picaresque novel. It is very short, and in its manner of matter-of-fact, laconic cynicism had probably never been bettered. It shows the Spanish genius in one of its most successful and characteristic moods, realistic and cruel humour. I have not read it in Castilian, though I believe it must be limpid and easy reading for a foreigner, but in its contemporary English version by David Rowland, so strongly recommended by Fitzmaurice Kelly. Lazarillo is a young devil who lives on his wits, and tells his own past adventures when, as town-crier of Toledo, with a wife who is under the benevolent protection of the Archdeacon of San Salvador, he has reached his peak of bland prosperity. It is an admirably neat and amusing story and, as the authoritative Fitzmaurice Kelly says, “may be read with as much edification and amusement as on the day of its first appearance.” So over the bridge with us, seeking less tricky fortune than Lazarillo, and only looking back to reflect that Salamanca is at its best in this perspective—seen as a whole, as a shapely assemblage, a successful municipal achievement. Which it would please the Barber to hear. God be with him. And now two hours to Avila by bus. Two hours of summer evening on a Castilian road.

(1878–1976)

from
NINE POUNDS OF LUGGAGE

So I ran away. I hurried more than if lions had chased me. Without telling him. Without telling my mother or father. There wasn’t any liberty in San Francisco for ordinary women. But I found some. No jobs for girls in offices like there are now. You got married, were an old maid, or went to hell. Take your pick.

That didn’t help much—just made worry for everybody. My parents finally found me and took me home. My husband’s family came out, some all the way from their dear “old New England” home, and begged me to come back to their only son. I just couldn’t do it. There was nothing the matter with him for somebody else. He might have made a good husband for another. So I tried to get a divorce.

But the poor old judge said I was too young. There must be a reconciliation. Something about the fine old East and the fresh young West getting along together. But those pretty words were a short-lived prophecy. As I rose to leave the courtroom, the fine old East delegation sneered a bit too much for my little five-foot-two mother who was born
and raised in California. She knocked a couple of teeth down my still husband’s throat, flattening out one Maine grin. Pa tossed him down a flight of stairs. The opposing lawyers calmly put down their brief cases and went to work on each other.

Soon the whole courtroom was in an uproar. I’ve seen some real battles in dance halls all over the world, but few to beat that one. Some of the proper, if pinched, Maine aunts fainted, others got out smelling salts, and the fight surged into the corridors. Everybody from everywhere else in the City Hall came to see, and soon all the grudges in the place were being ironed out in the mêlée. Like when two dogs bark and fight and other dogs—from Gawd knows where—come and stop, look and listen, and then pile in just for the fun of it.

By this time, I, “the bone” the fight was over, had crawled under the bench. The judge had left to join the fight. I saw ink bottles comet across space. I heard a skull crack with a noise like a batted baseball. Even a heavy chair slid off a bald head in a way that made me wince as I held my hand over my eyes.

It was a mess by the time the ambulances and patrol wagons came. The lawyers were in rags, hats were crushed, shirt-tails (those left whole) hung out. Both victors and vanquished were carted off.

That couldn’t happen since the “passing of the old West,” but I never hear the expression “rugged individualism” that I don’t think of that courtroom fight.

My father took me to some of his land in Trinity County, to get away from the scandal that nearly sunk the
Maine
. I had time to think it out up there, walking or riding horseback, in the woods. I knew I couldn’t go back to the husband the judge had left me tied to legally. And to me that meant I couldn’t live in San Francisco. Some see life in black and white; others—and they’re the lucky ones—in old-gold hues. But the life I knew then made me see red. Wanderlust can be the most glorious thing in the world sometimes, but when it gnaws and pricks at your innards, especially in spring, with your hands and feet tied, it’s awful. So I left. Without telling a soul.

I had a little money, and my banjo. I didn’t know what I’d do when the money ran out, but I went anyway, to Seattle, and quick as a wink
I got passage on a boat for Alaska. The air was full of the Klondyke. The lure of adventure pulled me aboard and the tied-down feeling stayed ashore.

Here I saw people I could understand. Here were those in the flesh who had filled my imagination, who had lived and traveled in my mental map of Old Mother Earth. Imagination is a grand, stimulating thing like a cocktail, but to find reality is the full course dinner with champagne. Those miners, prospectors, contractors, adventurers, gamblers; those other mysterious characters whose business it would be difficult to figure, suited my dream. There were a few women on the boat, planning to start hotels or restaurants, or do their mining in dance halls, and one or two like myself who just wanted to see what the Klondyke had in store for them. There were no prospectors’ wives, because prospectors didn’t have wives—not to mention. But no matter who they were or where they were from, both old and young had the spirit I admired.

From Skagway I went over the Pass to White Horse, part of the way hiking and part by dog team. I really felt free then in that country! From there by dog team five hundred miles to Dawson. Dogs and people were bursting to get into that capital of the frozen northland. I arrived with but ten dollars, but Mr. Rockefeller himself never felt richer. In that exhilarating atmosphere, I’d have bet I could clear the mountains with a hop, skip, and jump. The very air was electric, and the people were electric too, one hundred per cent alive, whatever else ailed them. What if they had run away from wives or husbands, conventions and restrictions? The call of adventure, the call of the wild, was in most of them, no matter what they were doing.

I can still hear the voice of the driver of that dog team yelling “Mush on!” (from the French Canadian “marchons”) in the cold crisp air. I was glad I went by dog team. Many who went by boat later in the summer were lost in the rapids. There’s a graveyard outside White Horse of bodies recovered.

Dawson was a small place, sprawled along the bank of the Yukon, at the foot of a hill with a big scar across it, most likely from mining activities. The Canadian Mounties and un-mounties kept it very well under control compared to the conditions I found later in Nome, which
was in United States territory. For awhile I shared a log cabin with a very sweet, beautiful and fair-minded girl—a visionary dreamer, honest as the day is long. I have thought of her through the years as the girl in Robert W. Service’s poem,
My Madonna
, for she had just such an expression—and eyes are the windows of the soul no matter what life we outwardly live. “My madonna—I hailed me a woman from the streets—shameless but, oh, so fair!” Years later I learned of her death in a prison to which she had been sentenced for the crime of theft of thousands. I am sure she never committed it. She loved a bartender, and many bartenders became rich through stealing from miners, drunkards, and others, when weighing out gold dust for drinks. She must have been used as a decoy. She was too good to ever be crooked. Regardless of what the people who live by somebody’s rules (God didn’t make them) may think about adventurers, they often have deeper feelings and loyalties than those who go in for show or behave because it’s supposed to be correct. The out-of-the-way places have their tragedies too—without any tear-jerking hokum thrown in.

At first I played my banjo in a variety hall, but the dance hall across the street, one of fifty or more ranged along the river front, was more exciting. So over I went. It was a popular place. Everybody gravitated there. Inside was a long bar, tables and chairs, a place to dance and a few rooms for the amorous ones. A big warm stove stood in the corner (it was cherry-red when forty below outside). The husky, happy-go-lucky men with their gold dust gathered there, and the beautiful girls from all over the world, flitted around like exotic butterflies. Even now, I feel the zip boom hurrah bang of that dance hall and the “what do we care” spirit in the air. No wonder Rex Beach glorified those girls in his novels. I’ve no doubt many have glorified themselves since and are now sitting on top of the world, for there’s nothing like a combination of liveliness and loveliness for landing a place in the sun.

There were, for instance, the three jolly Lamar sisters who married, one at a time, the happy-go-lucky prospector and miner, Swift Water Bill. ’Twas a family affair. All three threw their dice on the one man, and each in turn annexed a large chunk of his fortune along with a divorce. One day when we were eating together, the wittiest of the Lamars confided a story that illuminated the inner workings of Swift
Water’s mind. It seems she liked bacon and eggs for breakfast, but eggs were eggs in Dawson and Bill had bought them all, cornered the market, so that his lady love, who had been drifting in her affections, would either eat her eggs out of his hand or no eggs at all. No prolonged animal-trainer tactics for Swift Water Bill.

One girl I knew stayed for two winters with a miner on a Klondyke claim, for twenty thousand dollars. Another, a married girl, had come up to get some money because her husband was hurt and they weren’t doing well at home. She made several thousand, went back home, and bought a hotel in a mid-western city, and took care of her husband. They’ve done well since.

During my first night in the dance hall, the owner of a little restaurant clearing one hundred dollars a day (mostly from beans), an Austrian, came up and invited me to waltz.

“If you don’t promise these men you will go with them later, they won’t dance with you,” he coached me. “But you can always kid them along and fool them at the end.”