But I am keeping you waiting a long time before taking you to see Burgos, and I have told you nothing about hotel life.
The first things that strike you as you enter an old Spanish town at night are the dark and mysterious-looking men gliding along in the dark shadows, cloaked to the eyes. Nearly all Spaniards still wear the old ‘capa,’ or long black mantle, and the folds of this are so arranged as to completely muffle the face, leaving only the eyes visible. The Castilians muffle like this in the hottest weather. They dread a breath of fresh air. But it makes them look awfully like murderers, and it gave us quite a creepy sensation as we plodded through old, decaying Burgos, late at night, and came suddenly on men muffled in black to the eyes at the street corners. But having occasion to ask one to direct us to the hotel, he instantly flung his cloak from his face and disclosed his features. This is another Spanish custom. If you keep your cloak over your face when you stop anyone, or when you address anyone, you are at once supposed to be a bad character, or an assassin, and the man talking to you clasps his knife or his revolver, and gets ready for you.
We reached the hotel in Burgos in safety, and walked upstairs, and found a gentleman smoking a cigarette in an easy-chair, who rose and bowed, and told us to choose what rooms we liked and to make ourselves at home, and God be with us; and then he sat down and lit another cigarette. We chose our rooms, then went down and bargained with the gentleman for so much a day. All hotels in Spain lodge and feed you at so much a day, and you have to make the contract on arrival. There are no extras when once you have agreed to the price. We arranged at 50 reals a day each (a real is 2½d.). For this we had our rooms and the following meals: The desayuno in the bedroom, a cup of chocolate and a piece of sour bread; the almuerzo, or lunch, at eleven; the comida, or dinner, at seven. The Spanish lunch begins generally with eggs cooked in various fashions, then a roast, then the fish, very highly flavoured, then salad and the sweets and dessert. The fish is always served after meat. The dishes for dinner are few, but curious, and the cooking is excellent for those with cosmopolitan palates. The dishes cooked in oil are not deserving the opprobrium heaped upon them by bigoted British guide-book writers. The Spaniards do not over-eat like the French, and the meals are not long ones. But between every course at table d’hôte Spaniards smoke a cigarette. It is an excellent idea for filling in the waits; but English ladies don’t like it. There were no ladies and no English at our first table d’hôte, so we adopted the custom of the country.
Burgos is a grand old city, famous in history for many things, but for nothing so much as being the city of the Cid. You know who the great Cid was, or you ought to, so I won’t tell you. We saw his bones, and the bones of Ximena, his wife—the real bones and the real skulls, in a real coffin, in a room in the Prefecture hung with banners and patriotic emblems. Of course we saw the cathedral and the ancient gates and the old Palace of the Inquisition, now fallen to ruins. We stood and smoked cigarettes in the grass-grown courtyard, where many a hero had been done to death, where the hideous tortures devised by human fiends were carried out in the blasphemed name of God, and we leaned against old crumbling pillars that had looked down upon scenes of the most unutterable human anguish. All is but as a dream now, yet the old stones and pillars remain to this day, and cry out against the infamy of that dark and cruel era in the blood-stained annals of Spain. The rooms around, which look down upon the courtyard, are let to the poor at a shilling or two a month. The Palace of the Inquisition is now a slum, and from the windows where monarchs and grandees and Grand Inquisitors looked down hang the yellow rags of beggars and the blue sheets of poor labourers drying in the sun.
Burgos at night is the absolutely dullest place I ever saw in my life, and that is saying a good deal. Some Spanish gentlemen who had made friends with us at the hotel took us to a café, and we spent the evening in getting all the information out of them that we could. The theatre was shut, there was no music-hall, no entertainment of any kind. There is no trade in Burgos, and how the people live is a mystery. But for the military the place would be a city of the dead. And yet it is the capital of proud Castile, and was at one time the residence of kings. At ten at night I have the quiet deserted town almost to myself. I want to tire myself out and make myself sleep if I can, for my old enemy insomnia dogs my footsteps still. I smoke a cigarette under the shadow of the great cathedral. I cross the bridge of the dried-up Arlanzon (all the rivers of Spain have been emptied in consequence of the rapidly-increasing export of Spanish wines), and I linger by the ruins of the house of the mighty Cid. Everywhere I am alone save for some cloaked and muffled figure that steals past me now and then, stealthily and silently as a man bent on a mission of midnight assassination.
I am not afraid. Albert Edward is always close by me with a sword-stick, a revolver, and a pair of fists that, though they have not much skill, would be extremely useful in splitting pavingstones or breaking heads; and, better than all, the old Sereno, or night-watchman, who, with his lantern, his pointed staff, and his whistle, paces every street. The Sereno has plenty of work at night in a Spanish town. In addition to his duties as a watchman, he calls the hours. Quaint and weird upon the night air floats the old watchman’s cry, ‘Ten o’clock at night, and all’s well!’ ‘Las diez y sereno!’ It is from this last word, which means ‘All serene!’ that the watchman takes his name of ‘Sereno.’
He sees a good deal of the night side of (Spanish) nature, does the old Sereno. He passes my lady’s balcony at midnight, and sees the cloaked lover underneath twanging his guitar. He sees the lights in the rooms in the small hours when the watchers of the sick keep their long vigils, and he is the first to tumble over the bodies of the wounded and the murdered at the street corners. Then his whistle rings out clear and shrill over the silence, and the police come up and bear the body away. Assassinations are still common enough in Spain. Every street-corner is famous for somebody who was done to death at it. The lower classes and many of the middle classes still carry the murderous ‘navaja,’ and justice rarely overtakes the midnight assassin. Some of the murders are political, but most of them are ‘all on account of Eliza.’ The Spanish men are furiously jealous, and the Spanish women are terrible flirts. The national custom of concealing your features entirely at night lends itself splendidly to the use of the knife at dark street-corners.
We left Burgos by the night mail for Madrid. At the hotel they gave us an omnibus. The roof was so low that we had to crawl in on our hands and knees and lie flat on the cushions till we got to the station. There we were the only passengers, but the station-master (another halfpenny cigar did it) took us to his own private room and gave us armchairs in front of his private fire while we waited. He took our hats and placed them in royal state on more armchairs, and when the train arrived he personally conducted us to it, recommended us to the guard, and, bestowing on us all the titles of the noblest grandees of Old Castile, expressed a devout desire that he, too, might have the honour of renewing our acquaintance in God’s big parlour.
CHAPTER IV.
MADRID—BULL FIGHTS, THEATRES, CAFÉS, AND COCIDO.
The journey from Burgos to Madrid takes ten hours by the express. There is only one good train a day to anywhere in Spain. When it doesn’t start at eight at night it starts at eight in the morning. This is a dreadful nuisance to people who object equally to travelling all night and to getting up at six in the morning. All trains, except the one express, are fearfully slow. You can take twenty-two hours to do a hundred miles on some of the lines.