Abbots and monks, lay brothers, and cooks have gone the way of all
flesh; and of the plethoric plenty of old no vestige remains in the
enormous dingy hall. So, there being no fatted calf killed for me in
these degenerate days, I wend my way through the acacia avenues to the
humble hostelry where a dinner is prepared for me, eatable, it is true,
but a sad falling off from the culinary splendours of Alcobaça in the
good old times.
Then in the gloaming I drove four miles through woods of pine and
eucalyptus, balsamic now in the soft evening air, to Vallado station on
the railway to Lisbon. Out of the darkness at about seven there sprang a
long spinning factory blazing with electric light, and humming with the
whirr of wheels. The “hands” were just flocking out from their daily
toil, and filled the black, unlit road with a gay babbling crowd. There
was no town near, and the mill was deeply embosomed in the pine woods:
this seemed to me an ideal form of factory life, in which the house of
toil, instead of debouching its crowd of pallid workers into fetid
town-slums to fester unwholesomely until the morrow, needed but a step
from its threshold to plunge them into the sweet air of the pines and
heather; and where the “hands,” though they worked in crowds underneath
a roof, never ceased to be country folk. It was but a passing flash and
hubbub to me in the darkness of my lonely drive, and the toilers to me,
and I to them, but fleeting shadows. But seen thus, there seemed to me
something of suggestive possibilities in this hive of what is usually an
urban industry, set in the midst of lofty pines, sweet mountain herbs,
and far-flung folds of purple heather. A railway journey of
three-quarters of an hour brought me to the famous medicinal thermal
watering-place of Caldas da Rainha, where in the excellent Hotel
Lisbonense, which the proprietor, one of those frugal, honest, Gallegos
who are the industrial salt of the Peninsula, told me was the largest in
Portugal, as it is certainly one of the best, I ended a long day of
overcrowded impressions by a night of delightful dreamless sleep.
VII
CINTRA