“Not even Mrs. Ewings would believe it,” she assured Sylvia. “It’s got to be seen to be believed. I opened my mouth a bit wide when I first came to France, but France is Peckham Rye if you put it alongside of Spain. When that guard or whatever he calls himself opened our door and bobbed in out of the runnel with the train going full speed and asked for our tickets, you could have knocked me down with a feather. Showing off, that’s what I call it. And carrying wine inside of goats! Disgusting I should say. Nice set-out there’d be in England if the brewers started sending round beer inside of sheep. Why, it would cause a regular outcry; but these Spanish seem to put up with everything. I’m not surprised they come round selling water at every station. The cheek of it though, when you come to think about it. Putting wine inside of goats so as to make people buy water. If I’d have been an enterprising woman like Mrs. Marsham, I should have got out at the last station and complained to the police about it. But really the stations aren’t fit for a decent person to walk about in. I’m not considered very particular, but when a station consists of nothing but a signal-box and a lavatory and no platform, I don’t call it a station. And what a childish way of starting a train—blowing a toy horn like that. More like a school treat than a railway journey. And the turkeys! Now I ask you, Sylvia, would you believe it? Four turkeys under the seat and three on the rack over me head. A regular Harlequinade! And every time anybody takes out a cigarette or a bit of bread they offer it all around the compartment. Fortunately I don’t look hungry, or they might have been offended. No wonder England’s full of aliens. I shall explain the reason of it when I get home.”
The place of entertainment where Sylvia worked was called the Teatro Japonés, for what reason it would have been difficult to say. The girls were, as usual, mostly French, but there were one or two Spanish dancers that, as Mrs. Gainsborough put it, kept one “rum-tum-tumming in one’s seat all the time it was going on.” Sylvia found Madrid a dull city entirely without romance of aspect, nor did the pictures in the Prado make up for the bull-ring’s wintry desolation. Mrs. Gainsborough considered the most remarkable evidence of Spanish eccentricity was the way in which flocks of turkeys, after traveling in passenger-trains, actually wandered about the chief thoroughfares.
“Suppose if I was to go shooing across Piccadilly with a herd of chickens, let alone turkeys, well, it would be a circus, and that’s a fact.”
When they first arrived they stayed at a large hotel in the Puerta del Sol, but Mrs. Gainsborough got into trouble with the baths, partly because they cost five pesetas each and partly because she said it went to her heart to see a perfectly clean sheet floating about in the water. After that they tried a smaller hotel, where they were fairly comfortable, though Mrs. Gainsborough took a long time to get used to being brought chocolate in the morning.
“I miss my morning tea, Sylvia, and it’s no use me pretending I don’t. I don’t feel like chocolate in the morning. I’d just as lieve have a slice of plum-pudding in a cup. Why, if you try to put a lump of sugar in, it won’t sink; it keeps bobbing up like a kitten. And another thing I can’t seem to get used to is having the fish after the meat. Every time it comes in like that it seems a kind of carelessness. What fish it is, too, when it does come. Well, they say a donkey can eat thistles, but it would take him all his time to get through one of those fish. No wonder they serve them after the meat. I should think they were afraid of the amount of meat any one might eat, trying to get the bones out of one’s throat. I’ve felt like a pincushion ever since I got to Madrid, and how you can sing beats me. Your throat must be like a zither by now.”
It really did not seem worth while to remain any longer in Madrid, and Sylvia asked to be released from her contract. The manager, who had been wondering to all the other girls why Sylvia had ever been sent to him, discovered that she was his chief attraction when she wanted to break the contract. However, a hundred pesetas in his own pocket removed all objections, and she was free to leave Spain.
“Well, do you want to go home?” she asked Mrs. Gainsborough. “Or would you come to Seville?”
“Now we’ve come so far, we may as well go on a bit farther,” Mrs. Gainsborough thought.
Seville was very different from Madrid.
“Really, when you see oranges growing in the streets,” Mrs. Gainsborough said, “you begin to understand why people ever goes abroad. Why, the flowers are really grand, Sylvia. Carnations as common as daisies. Well, I declare, I wrote home a post-card to Mrs. Beardmore and told her Seville was like being in a conservatory. She’s living near Kew now, so she’ll understand my meaning.”