Outside this narrow circle the Savages, carried away by their enthusiasm for credit, bring it into play in their relations with the tailor, the housekeeper, the coach-builder, the horse-dealer, and the jeweller, not to mention transactions on a large scale with their banker or landlord. Thanks to this inestimable element of economical science, coin of the realm has become almost unnecessary to the members of the club. Its function is beautifully fulfilled by an abstract and more spiritual medium—promises to pay, verbal or written. They live and spend as freely as their prototypes in London, without pounds sterling, shillings, dollars, and pesetas, or anything of the kind. The superior advantages of the Madrid Club in this respect are self-evident.
Nor are they less in the cool and frank impertinence with which the members treat each other. By degrees they have quite given up the polite and ceremonious courtesy which characterises the solemn British gentleman; their manners have gained in local colour approaching more and more to those of the picturesque quarters of Madrid known as Lavapiés and Maravillas. Nature, race, and opportunity are elements it is impossible to resist, whether in politics or in social amusements.
The club always begins to warm up after midnight, the fever is at its height at about three in the morning, and then it begins to cool down again. By five or six every one has gone piously to bed. During the day the place is comparatively deserted. Two or three dozen of the members drop in in the afternoon, before taking a walk, to colour their pipes. Stupefied by sleepiness they speak but little. They need the excitement of night to display their native talents in all their brilliancy. These are concentrated for the time on the noble task of bringing a meerschaum to a fine coffee-colour. If, as some assert, objects of art were once objects of utility, so that the notion of art involves that of usefulness, it must be confessed that, in the matter of their pipes, the members of the Savage Club work like true artists. They have them sent from Paris and London; on them are engraved the initials of the owner with the count's or marquis's coronet, if the smoker has a right to it; they keep them in elegant cases, and when they take them out to smoke, it is with such care and so many precautions that the pipes become more troublesome than useful. A "Savage" has been known to make himself ill by smoking cigar after cigar solely for the pleasure of colouring his mouthpiece sooner than his fellows. No one cares about the flavour of the tobacco; the only important point is to draw the smoke in such a way as to colour the meerschaum equally all over. Now and again taking out a fine cambric handkerchief, the smoker will spend many minutes in rubbing the pipe with the most delicate care, while his spirit reposes in sweet abstraction from all earthly cares.
Grave, dignified, and harmonious in grace, the most select of the members of the club sucked and blew tobacco smoke from two till four in the afternoon. There is something confidential and pensive in the task, as in every artistic effort, which induces them to cast their eyes down and fix their gaze so as to enjoy more entirely the pure vision of the Idea which lies occult in every amber and meerschaum cigar-holder. In this elevated frame of mind lounged our friend Pepe Castro, smoking a pipe in the shape of a horse's leg, when the voice of Rafael Alcantara roused him from his ecstasy by calling across the room:
"Then you have actually sold the mare, Pepe?"
"Some days ago."
"The English mare?"
"The English mare?" he echoed, looking up at his friend with reproachful surprise. "No, my good fellow, the cross-bred."
"Why, it is not more than two months since you bought her. I never dreamed of your wanting to get rid of her."
"You see I did," said the handsome dandy, affecting an air of mystery.