The train that I boarded at eleven was crowded with countrymen returning from the day's festival, a merry but in no sense intoxicated company, in which I saw my first wooden-shod Galicians. The car was, for once, of the American pattern--though of Spanish width--with thirty seats each large enough for three persons. The brakeman, too, who stood lantern on arm in the open door, bore an unusual resemblance to an American "shack."
A dozen men were standing in the aisle, but to my surprise one seat near the center of the car seemed to be unoccupied. When I reached it, however, I found a priest stretched out on his back, his hands clasped over his paunch, snoring impressively. I carried a protest to the brakeman and with a snort he swooped down upon the sleeper. At sight of him, however, he recoiled.
"Carajo!" he cried. "Es un padre! I could n't disturb his reverence."
I stooped and touched the monopolist on the shoulder, being in no mood to remain standing all night. Moreover, I had long been curious to know the Spaniard's attitude toward a man who should treat a priest as an ordinary human being. "His reverence" grunted. I touched him again. His snore lost a beat or two and began once more. I shook him more forcibly. He opened his blood-shot eyes, snorted "Huh!" so much like a certain monopolist of the animal kingdom that even the passengers about me laughed at the resemblance--and fell again to snoring. I sat down gently on his fat legs and, when he kicked me off, confiscated a place. He sat up with the look of a man whose known world has suddenly crumbled about his ears and glared at me with bulging eyes a full two minutes, while over the faces of the onlookers flitted a series of winks and smiles.
He was just huddling himself up again in the two-thirds of the seat that remained to him when the door opened and Trueno, the matador, his little coleta peeping out from beneath his hat, his sword-case under one arm, entered and, spying the extra place, sat down in it with scant ceremony. We fell to talking. The torero was a jovial, explosive, devil-may-care fellow who looked and dressed his character well. The priest slunk off somewhere in the thickest hours and his place was taken by a peasant who had been standing near me since leaving Salamanca. When he found opportunity to break into the conversation he addressed me with an amused smile:
"You are not then a Catholic, señor?"
"No."
"Ah! A socialist!" he cried with assurance.
For to the masses of southern Europe socialist and non-Catholic are synonymous.
"I doubt, señor," I observed, "whether you yourself are a Catholic."