The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James

crest of the rock the panorama is aweinspiring: I seem to be on the roof of the world and the snow-covered Pyrenean chain in the distance belongs to another universe. Near me on the opposite mountain spur below rises the Basilica of Bernadette out of the grey rock with its steps descending to the broad esplanade near the River Gave. Deep below in the valley lies the modern town with its shops and hotels. Today the sun is shining, the birds are singing and spring for the first time is in the air. As my feet have miraculously healed themselves and my asthma has abated I feel reborn as a Jacobean and eager to continue my pilgrimage along the road to Compostella.

CROSSING THE FRONTIER

    As I was on a pilgrimage I avoided all entanglements in Pau—no easy matter, for one of the first people I met on the Boulevard des Pyrénées was a Spanish journalist whom I had known in the old days at the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid. His eagerness to obtain the latest news from Madrid, Barcelona, Seville, even the lightest tittle tattle from the tertulias, was pathetic, and made me reflect on how sad is the lot of the exile and I thought of Cacciaguida’s prophecy to Dante of exile and penury:

    Tu lascerai ogni cosa diletta
    pià caramente; e questa e quello strale
    che l’arco de lo esilio pria saetta,
    Tu proverai si come sa di sale Lo pane altrui, e come è duro calle lo scendere, e’l salir per Valtrui scale.
    (Thou shalt leave behind everything beloved most dearly: and this is the arrow which the bow of exile first shoots.
    Thou shalt experience how salt with tears doth taste another’s bread or to climb another’s stairs how hard a path.)

    Exile is harder for the Spaniard than for any other European people, because of the peculiarly cohesive nature of his relations to his country and family. I have never known a Spaniard abroad who did not suffer from incurable homesickness after a year’s absence from his native country. Hence the difficulty I always used to find in persuading Spanish graduates to accept more than a year’s study in foreign universities. People find the same tendency in the Irish, and I remember the eagerness with which the great writer James Joyce used to question those of us who had just come from Dublin, begging us to tell him of this or that ‘local character’, how he was dressed, what pubs he frequented at particular hours of the day and who were the ‘boys’ who gathered round the great men in their accustomed haunts. The Spaniard like the Irishman, when he leaves his country, feels always an exile. He may make millions of dollars in the United States, millions of pesos in the Argentine and he may become a loyal citizen of America or the Argentine, but forever he possesses intact in his soul a hidden temple into which he retires again and again and where he preserves jealously his fondest illusions about his ‘Dark Rosaleen’ or his Tierra de María Santisima, as the case may be.
    The Spanish Civil War, however, has undoubtedly exacerbated the longing of the exiles, political and otherwise, to return to Spain, and made the resemblance between the Spanish and the Irish temperament more marked. I profoundly pitied my Spanish journalist friend at Pau, but I felt that the civil wars we had both suffered in our countries had created a bond of friendship linking us still more closely than in the ancient days of the ‘Wild Geese’ and the Irish Brigade, when Spain was a refuge for the Irish.
    Pau has all the air of being the headquarters of Les Rois en Exil, and it is hard to imagine it as a centre for Spanish anarchists and revolutionaries, yet Spanish friends spoke with bated breath and a certain amount of unconscious admiration of the exploits of Paco el Madrileño, the Red revolutionary, just as they used to do of the romantic bandit Luis Candelas. Pau reminded me continually of Cheltenham, for it was crowded with counts and marquises of straitened means, who basked in the sun; of generals en retraite and invalid English, who discovered the city in the Romantic age over a hundred years ago, when the poet Alfred de Vigny, then an infantry captain, married Miss Lydia Bun-bury. For me Pau possessed a special cachet, because I used to visit there from time to time a distinguished Irish friend, the Marquis Mac-Swiney, diplomat and chamberlain at the Vatican, whose mother, a Polish countess, held her court here. The marquis, who belonged to a category that, alas, has quite disappeared