“Well, let's look at your other bidons. We shall be in a fix if we're held up here.”
“Two more empty,” announced Ropes. “And three bidons don't suddenly take to leaking, of themselves. I suppose if I'd had my wits about me, I'd have looked, at Toledo, before starting; but who's to think of everything? I did have a thorough go at the car, for fear of mischief, but forgot the bidons However, there's one to go on with, I'm pretty sure; for it's stowed away in a place nobody would think of, if they had to do the villain act in a hurry.”
Whereupon he handed out a new bidon from the tool box, and we both gave a sigh of relief to see that it was intact. At least, we had now enough to get us to Manzanares; and at worst we could but be hung up there while Ropes went back by train as far as Madrid to buy petrol.
While we had been making these discoveries, however, the village had been discovering us. It was not the time of year, as Pilar said, for bears and monkeys to arrive by road, therefore when something was seen approaching rapidly and stopping suddenly, the inhabitants of the white town had not been able to bear the suspense. Somebody had given the word that there [pg 172]was a thing to see, and out Torralba came pouring in its hundreds, a brilliant procession a full quarter of a mile long.
Youth and beauty took the lead. Girls with arms thrown round the shoulders of one another's blue, pink, or yellow jackets skipped along the dazzling road like peasant graces. Little, star-eyed brown boys had apparently taken the trouble to step off Murillo's canvases to find out what we were, while their toddling sisters cried at being outdistanced. Behind these came men, middle-aged and old, in strange-shaped caps like fur and leather coal-scuttles, women with bare black heads, or faded blue handkerchiefs shadowing withered faces, and beggars hobbling on their sticks; a shouting, laughing army pouring its bright coloured stream down the white line of the straight road. And before the Gloria had been refreshed with her long drink of petrol, the wave of life had broken round her bonnet. Bright eyes stared, brown hands all but touched us; and children knew not whether to shriek with fright or laugh with joy as they saw themselves reflected in the glass turned up against our roof. But at the first cough of the motor as it throbbed into waking, the throng rolled back, dividing to let us pass, as if the car had cloven it in two, and joining again to tear home in our wake.
All the able-bodied women who had not come out to meet us were sitting before the doors of their white houses, making lace mantillas and flounces for the young Queen-elect,—Torralba is famous for its lace-makers,—and they waved work-worn hands as we ran by, wishing us good speed, or throwing an improvised copla after the vanishing Gloria.
Now we were in Don Quixote land; and had we gone back to his day as we entered his country of La Mancha, our red car could have roused little more excitement. Village after village turned out for us; always the same gorgeous colours against the background of white houses and blue arch of sky; always the same brilliant eyes and rich brown faces with scarlet lips that laughed. It was even a relief to the monotony to meet a band of fierce-eyed young carters ranged in a line with big stones [pg 173]in their hands, wanting to bash in the aristocrat's features, if the aristocrats frightened their mules. But neither the aristocrats nor mules showed fear. Pilar even leaned out, as if daring the four or five sullen fellows to throw their stones into a girl's face, and their arms fell inoffensively.
“I don't believe any Spaniard, no matter how bad, would hurt a woman who had done him no harm!” she exclaimed.
The road, with its rutty, irritating surface, seemed endless. We had started late, according to our promise, and having lost more than an hour on the “short cut,” grey wings of twilight began at last to fold in the landscape. It was long since we had passed a village; Manzanares was not yet near, and I began to wonder whether the Gloria would not again grow thirsty before we could give her drink.
Turn after turn; always the same jolting; always the same scene, till our minds wearied. Then, suddenly rounding a bend, we came upon something which made every one of us forget boredom.