MILLS & BOON, LIMITED
49 RUPERT STREET
LONDON, W.
Published 1914
INTRODUCTORY
To the foreigner visiting Spain for the first time so many things seem topsy-turvy that, unless a philosophical spirit be cultivated, one’s temper might suffer serious damage. But there is one way not only to endure, but actually to enjoy the minor discomforts, absence of consistency, and utter lack of common sense forced upon one at every turn in this most original country; and that is to regard them all from the standpoint of comic opera. So many people expect to find Spain merely an enlarged edition of Bizet’s Carmen that it ought not to be difficult for them to smile when comic-operatic incidents are enacted before them in daily life; and yet one often sees the impatient traveller exhausting himself in furious denunciations of tough beef, bad butter, unpunctual trains, faulty postal services, retrograde hotels, and so on ad infinitum, instead of thanking his lucky stars that there is still one country in Europe which remains much as God made it, instead of being recast in the mould preferred by the tourist agencies.
No doubt when we get express trains flying from Irun to Madrid and from Granada to Seville at sixty miles an hour, with a chain of cosmopolitan hotels all along the road, those tourist agencies will be able to do far better business. But their clients will not then travel in Spain but in Cosmopolitania, and the last stronghold of romance left in Western Europe will have gone the way of Switzerland and Italy, where in some towns it is almost the exception to hear the language of the native spoken in the streets. Thank Heaven, Spain has not yet awakened to the commercial advantages of moulding her national characteristics into the groove of the common-place, and her soul has not yet been cut out and thrown away in the pursuit of filthy lucre.
Meanwhile, the traveller who follows the beaten track has really very little to complain of, for during the last ten years great progress has been made both in the train service and the hotel accommodation; and when you have grumbled and slept and scolded through the eight or ten or twelve or twenty hours’ railway journey from one provincial capital to another, and take your place at the table d’hôte in one of the big new hotels, you might almost imagine yourself in London or Paris or New York. One thing, however, reminds you that you are in Spain: the anxious solicitude of the waiters, who watch your every mouthful as if it were a matter of personal consequence to them that you should be pleased with your dinner, and press fresh dishes upon you if you do not eat as much as they think you ought, assuring you that they are very excellent and that you must keep up your strength in order to enjoy the beautiful monuments that you are going to visit to-morrow. This interest of the mozo in his master’s client is genuine, not inspired by the anticipation of favours to come. He feels it as a reflection upon the credit of the house if you refuse to take every course, and finds it difficult to understand that abstinence may mean satiety, not dissatisfaction with the viands. I doubt if anywhere else one seems of quite so much importance in the eyes of the establishment as in Spain, for these attentions begin with your first meal in the hotel and are continued throughout your stay; and can anything make you more at home in an hotel than a cordial interest in your appetite?
If you complain of the interminable time that you have spent on the journey, you will be met with the grave assurance that it is safer to travel slow than fast, and that Spain has far fewer railway accidents than England or the United States. You may reply that she has far fewer trains, but we don’t trouble ourselves about the law of averages in Spain, and the Spaniard solemnly assures you that nothing is gained by the alarming rapidity of Anglo-Saxon life except more speedy arrival at the grave.