The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James

or a roast capon jump at the table.’ He then gives the following directions for carrying it out: ‘Take a drop of brandy, a chip of celery and a crumb of bread and soak the crumb well in the brandy. Then put the chip of celery on the soaked breadcrumb and feed it to the chicken and it will immediately fall to the ground as though dead. Then you must pluck the fowl and smear it all over with honey and saffron, which will give it the appearance of having been roasted. When you wish the fowl to jump at table, all you have to do is to moisten its beak with strong vinegar and straightway the bird will stand up in the dish, as has been proved.’
    My friend the late Sir Henry Thomas, celebrated British Hispanist, who had visited Santo Domingo de la Calzada, was convinced that this characteristic mediaeval parlour trick was the origin of the miracle of the white cock and hen, and he adds that if the trick is tried on a rooster, the monarch of the barnyard, when suddenly roused from his alcoholic slumbers, finding himself glared at by a table full of guests would probably rise up in protest, and with chanticleer indignation crow loudly and repeatedly, thus converting the game into a miracle. *
    In the evening, when I met some of the young men of the town in the Bar Deportivo and as my repeated glasses of Rioja wine had given me a little dose of devilry, I broached the subject of the chickens, saying: “You people evidently do not believe any longer in the miracle of the white cock and hen: the cage is empty.”
    ‘The church is too cold: they will be put in the cage on our Saint’s festival on May the twelfth. Then you will hear the cock crow.”
    “I wonder the Bishop allows the chickens to be put in the cathedral at all. After all, the whole chicken business was originally a commercial traveller’s racket and one as old as the hills.”
    “What do you mean?” said one of the young men sharply.
    As I told them the story of the trick I saw the storm rising and there was hostility in every eye. To remedy matters, I called for a further round, but instead of pouring oil on troubled waters I was fanning the flames, and there was an uproar when I finished the story. I had, they said in chorus, called in question the good name of the town: I had falsified history and insulted the memory of the Saint.
    “You Englishmen are all heretics,” said one. “The English are a nation of innkeepers and shopkeepers,” said another paraphrasing Napoleon: “Why don’t you give back Gibraltar?” a third said fiercely.
    I tried to stem the tide of abuse, but in vain, and I realized that I had stepped on a hornet’s nest and that the modern inhabitants of Santo Domingo de la Calzada, living in the age of the radio, the aeroplane and the atomic bomb, still treated all the traditions, legends, myths and miracles connected with the history of their town as articles of Holy Writ. I had, however, one ally among the party, a middle-aged Asturian commercial traveller who intervened in the debate saying that he was as good a Catholic as any of them, but he believed many of the Jacobean pilgrims were impostors and told tall stories which were received with open-mouthed astonishment by ignorant clod-hoppers and beatas who had no education. “The whole trouble,” he cried, “is lack of education: we live in the age of science and men are no longer satisfied by fairy stories and old wives’ tales.”
    As we argued I found myself taking sides against my Asturian champion who was a complete materialist and admired the British for their least lovable characteristics. At length peace came when I explained that I had not personally insulted St. Dominic of the Causeway or his tribe, or the white chickens, but had merely quoted from the writing of an anonymous Spaniard of the Middle Ages who described a trick which commercial travellers used to perform in the inns on a winter night to amuse the company. We toasted one another in glasses of aniseed brandy and the Asturian commercial traveller and I were invited by the rest to the casino where a dance was in progress. Before I returned to my inn my host said to me: “When you come to the Saint’s festival you will see the white cock and the hen in their accustomed place and we shall give you one of their white feathers for your hat to bring you luck on your pilgrimage to Compostella.”
    The Asturian, as we walked back, said to me scornfully: “Son muy bestias! Not even the Civil War nor a