We dropped asleep in the rough, time-worn regions of Old Castile, and in the morning found ourselves amid the glare and bustle of reconstructed Spain, as it displays itself on the great square called the Gate of the Sun—a spot with no hint of poetry about it other than its name. Madrid adopts largely the Parisian style of street architecture, and has in portions a resemblance to Boston. The sense of remoteness aroused in the north here suddenly fades, though the traits that mark a foreign land soon re-assemble and take shape in a new framework. Perhaps, too, our first rather flat impression was due to an exhausting night journey and some accompanying incidents.
"The Spaniards are a nation of robbers!" a cheerful French gentleman of Bordeaux had told us;[3] and he threw out warnings of certain little coin tricks in which they were adepts. When two Civil Guards, armed with swords and guns, inspected our train at the frontier, we recalled his statement. These guards persistently popped up at every succeeding station. No matter how fast the train went, there they were always waiting; always two of them, always with the same mustached faces, and the same white havelocks fluttering on their bunchy cocked hats of the French Revolution, and making their swarthy cheeks and black eyes fiercer by contrast. In fact, they were obviously the same men. Every time they marched up and down the platform, scanning the cars in a determined manner, and scowling at our compartment in a way that fully persuaded us some one must be guilty. Indeed, before long we became convinced that we ourselves were suspicious; but it would have been a relief if they had taken us in hand at once. Why should they go on glaring at us and swinging their guns, as if it were a good deal easier to shoot us than not, unless it was that we were too rich a "find" to be disposed of immediately—squandered, as it were? Perhaps the torture of suspense suited the enormity of our case, but it was certainly cruel. There was some satisfaction, however, in finding that when we left the depôt they allowed us a restricted liberty, and kept out of our way. If it had been otherwise, I don't know what they would have done to us at Burgos, for it was there that the landlady forced upon us a gold piece that would not pass, in exchange for a good one which we had given her. This very simple device was one of which the French gentleman had told us. But we were too confiding. The money to pay the bill was sent away by a servant, and once out of sight was easily replaced with inferior coin. Disturbed by this episode, we went to our train, which started with the watchman's first hail at eleven, and stumbled hastily into an empty compartment, which we soon converted into a sleeping-carriage by making our bundles pillows, drawing curtains, and pulling the silk screen over the lamp. Our nap was broken only by a halt at the next station. There was a long, drowsy pause, during which the train seemed to be pretending it hadn't been asleep. It was nearly time to go on, when feminine voices drew near our carriage; the door was thrown open, and two ladies quickly entered. There was no time for retreat; the usual fish-horn and dinner-bell accompaniment announced our departure, and the wheels moved. Then it was that one of the new-comers uttered a half scream, and we saw that she was a nun!
Had it been a cooler night our blood might have frozen; but as it failed us, we did what we could by feeling greatly embarrassed. The nun and her travelling companion had been speaking Spanish as they approached, and we tried in that language to impress on them our harmless devotion to their convenience.
"But he said it was reserved for ladies," murmured the sister, in good English.
The terrible truth was now clear. My eye caught, at the same instant, a card in the window which proved beyond question that we had got into the carriage for señoras.
The result of this adventure was that we found the nun to be an English Catholic, employed in teaching at a religious establishment, and her friend another Englishwoman protecting her on her journey. Pleasant conversation ensued, and we had almost forgotten that we were criminals, when the speed of the engine slackened again, and the thought of the Civil Guards returned to haunt us. We did not dare remain, yet we were sure that our military pursuers would confront us again on the platform. There indeed they were, when we tumbled out into the obscurity, with their white-hooded heads looming above their muskets in startling disconnectedness. Telling Velazquez, with all the firmness I possessed, to bare his breast to the avenging sword, I hastened to get into a coupé, preferring to die comfortably. He, however, ignominiously followed me. It is true, we were not molested; but the shock of that narrow escape kept us wakeful.
Not even our own prairies, I think, could present so dreary and monotonous an outlook as the wide, endless, treeless Castilian plains while morning slowly felt its way across them. Brown and cold they were, skirted by white roads, and all shorn of their barley crops, though it was but middle June. Now and then a village was seen huddled against some low slope—a church lifting its tall, square campanario above the humble roofs against the pearling sky. Interior Spain is a desolate land, but the Church thrives there and draws its tax from the poverty-stricken inhabitants—a crowned beggar ruling over beggars.
If the first man were now to be created from the clay of this region, he would doubtless turn out the very type of a lean hidalgo. The human product of such soil must perforce be meagre and melancholy; and the pensiveness which we see in most Spanish faces seems a reflection of the landscape which surrounds them.
The Madrileños offer not a flat, but rather an extremely round contradiction to this general and accepted idea of the national appearance. Slenderness is the exception with them. Their city is a forced flower in the midst of mountain lands, and the men themselves rejoice in a rotund and puffy look of success, which also partakes of the hot-house character. They are people of leisure, and, after their manner, of pleasure. How they swarm in the cafés in the Gate of the Sun—where they keep up the Moorish custom of calling waiters by two claps of the hands—or on the one great thoroughfare, Calle de Alcalá, or in the bull-ring of a Sunday! They are never at rest, yet never altogether active. They never sleep, or, if they do, others take their places in the public resorts. The clamor of the streets, and even the snarling cry of the news-venders—"La Correspondencia," or "El Demó-crata-a"—is kept up until the small hours; and at five or six the restless stir begins again with the silver tinkling of fleet mule-bells. There are no night-howling watchmen in Madrid; but the custom of street-hawking is rampant in Spain; and here, in addition to the newsmen, we have the wail of the water-criers, ministering to an unquenchable popular thirst, the lottery-ticket sellers, the wax-match peddlers, and a dozen others. The favorite bird of the country is a kind of lark called alondra, much hung in cages outside the windows, whence they utter—with that monotonous recurrence which seems a fixed principle of all things Spanish—a hard, piercing triple note impossible to ignore. This loud, persistent "twit, twit-twit," resembling at a distance the click of castanets, begins with daybreak, and gives a most discouraging notion of the Spanish musical ear.