Madrid is very much like a volcano on the eve of an eruption. Day and night there is a seething mass of cloaked gentry promenading the streets and squares in the eager hope of something turning up. The Puerta del Sol is as much alive at two in the morning as our Mansion House corner is at two in the afternoon. When the Spaniards go to bed is a mystery. Special editions of the evening papers come out in Madrid at 1 a.m., and small boys of the street-Arab type yell their ‘Speshal ‘Dishuns’ under your window till three, and if anything is on, until four. This all-night shouting and the ceaseless traffic no one who has the misfortune to sleep in a room looking on to the Puerta del Sol will ever forget. And the reason that Madrid is on the alert all night is that it is waiting, like Mr. Micawber, for something to turn up. When something does turn up to justify a row, the Madrileños make the most of it, and they yell ‘Muerta!’ just as a London mob would yell ‘Let him have it!’ ‘Muerta!’ is cried when the spectators in the bull-ring have had enough of the bull, and want him got rid of. ‘Muerta!’ shouted concerning a politician, a prelate, or a prince, means ‘Let him take his hook!’
That expression, by-the-by, though it looks like English slang, is quite a classical utterance. Its origin lies among the Roman gladiatorial games. A gladiator took his hook when the pole with a hook at the end of it was used to drag his dying or dead body from the arena.
The window of my sitting-room looks out upon the world-famed Puerta del Sol. Night and day a mighty, ever-changing crowd passes before me. Night and day the plashing fountain plays in the middle of the great public square. Night and day trains and ‘buses and mule-drawn waggons and beautiful landaus and phaetons and broughams and mail-coaches drawn by horses not to be surpassed in Hyde Park dash here and there. Night and day the hum of the idle, sauntering crowd rises and falls, and makes music to my ears.
Madrid is not a city. It is only a town. But such a town!—such streets! such shops! such horses! such carriages! such drives! such promenades! and over all the everlasting gaiety and insouciance of a people whose grand motto in all things mundane is this, ‘We have only one life—let us make the best of it and worry about nothing.’ Your true Spaniard never hurries and never worries and never frets. He inherits the dignity and the fatalism of the Moors, who have left their mark not only on the architecture of the cities, but upon the character of the citizens. If anything is a little beyond him, he folds his hands, smokes a cigarette, and waits for the dénouement.
Quietly and calmly, with a Spanish guide who walked everywhere so leisurely that I had to keep walking round and round him in order not to leave him miles behind, I saw everything that was to be seen in Madrid. I saw the royal palaces, I saw the bed—ay, and the mattress and bolster—on which King Alfonso died. I saw the royal stables and the royal carriages, I got a desperate fit of the blues in the Escorial—the eighth wonder of the world, the morbid outcome of a morbid mind; the last home of Spanish kings—that glowing palace on a barren rock, in which the monkish Philip died a hideous death of lingering agony, loathsome to himself and all around him, and in his last hours smitten by a gnawing terror that, after all, the royal road to heaven might not be over the dead bodies of countless victims slain ‘to the greater glory of God.’ I drove in the Prado, and saw grandees of Spain by the gross. I met the sisters of the King and ‘el Rey Chico,’ ‘the King Baby,’ with his royal mamma, all out for a drive, and I had all the scandals poured into my ear as great and titled ladies passed in their magnificent equipages.
Some years ago the ladies of Madrid took to driving high-stepping horses in mail phaetons, and even tooling showy teams through the principal thoroughfares. In the crowded traffic this was the cause of frequent accidents. The alcalde (clever man!) made it a regulation that no lady under thirty should drive, except in the Park. You may go all over Madrid now, and you don’t meet a single lady holding the reins. They are all under the regulation age.
Next to the bull-fights and the theatres, the things in which I have taken the greatest interest in Spain are the dances and the funerals. Both of these are so curious that I shall leave them until I have travelled with the reader a little further afield. One thing struck me in Madrid as it has struck me everywhere in Spain, and that is the way in which the Germans are monopolizing the trade of the country. Every hotel is crammed with German commercial travellers, and the shops are filled with German goods. The Germans I meet are excellent linguists. They speak Spanish fluently, and many of them can carry on a conversation in English and French as well. The Germans have displayed an enterprise in getting the trade of Europe into their hands which is truly remarkable. Their dealers and manufacturers visit the different countries, study the popular taste, and then produce articles which are as national as possible in character. For instance, half the fans and mantillas which are sold in Madrid and the large provincial towns are of German make. And yet they are absolutely Spanish. Many other things are of German make, and thousands of French and English tourists who carry away with them boxes full of specimen Spanish goods to present to their friends are really taking home things which have been imported from the Fatherland. As to cigars, the Germans supply three-fourths of the genuine Havannahs, even in Spanish seaports at which ships from Havannah constantly touch.
France and England also do a large trade with Spain in manufactured goods. But they supply only the articles which are purely French and English. It has been reserved for Germany to supply, not only German, but Spanish goods to Spain.
The cafés in Madrid are enormous and gorgeous in the extreme. The climate does not allow the guests to sit out of doors, but the saloons inside are so vast that in some of them a regiment might go through its manœuvres. The cafés are thronged night and day. Here the revolutions are hatched, here governments are overthrown. Chocolate is the great Spanish drink, but of an evening quite half the people have tea.
And such tea! It is a pale lemon colour when you pour it out, and consists principally of hot water. I noticed several ladies and gentlemen flavoured it with a small glass of rum. The tea I had in one of the grand cafés was rum without being flavoured. In fact, it was the rummest tea I ever tasted in my life.