My brother worked very hard, trying to oversee those departments of the Government that were most easily watched, such as the army and the navy. He did not trust to official reports, but went himself to see if the reports were accurate. It was on such visits that we had our adventures with the mayors.
Once when we were out driving, he said: “Let us go to the French hospital. I must inspect it. We will go without warning, so that they will not be able to prepare appearances for me.” So we drove to the hospital, and when we entered and it was seen that the King had arrived a man who had been paralysed for years was so startled that he got to his feet and walked. A miracle! And I thought if it had happened a few centuries earlier it might have made my brother a saint. Who knows? I might have had a little shrine myself.
He gave audiences every afternoon to whatever persons wished to see him, whether to present petitions, or merely to pay their respects, or what not. And his patience with everybody amazed me. It was impossible, I found, to learn anything from those who came. They were usually too oppressed by the formalities to be natural. One day, when I was assisting an older sister at an audience to ladies of Madrid, one lady was so embarrassed that when my sister invited her to sit down—in the rather brusque voice that was her characteristic utterance—the lady sat down on a chair in which a kitten was lying. I supposed, at first, that the kitten had escaped, but I soon saw the lady growing red in the face and shifting in her chair, as if she were painfully uncomfortable. My sister tried to put her at her ease by asking her the conventional questions about herself, and I struggled to control my amusement, but without succeeding well enough to trust myself to interfere. At last my sister dismissed the lady, and turned on me to demand what was the matter with me that I should be grinning and choking instead of behaving myself with dignity. I cried: “But your kitten—your kitten!” And then I saw that my laughter had been very cruel, for the kitten was dead. The lady had accepted the invitation to sit down as a Royal order, and had not dared to get up off the cat till she was dismissed, although the poor thing was struggling and fighting under her for its life.
Naturally it was difficult to get any information from people under such conditions. Not that I wish to represent myself as going about with the air of a determined student eager to know. I had only a desultory curiosity that was continually stirred by finding some new puzzle of false appearance. My brother’s problems of government were usually laid aside with us. We shared his recreation rather than his work. And, being human, I was much more interested in myself, my own problems of life, and the outlook of my future than I was in anything else. Being a Royal person in Spain was, in some of its aspects, rather a lark, but in others it was serious. For however free I might be in my mind to be amused, to be curious, to be cynical, there was no disguising the fact that I was limited in my friends, controlled in my affections, and of liberty in love and marriage wholly deprived. My mind might be what I pleased—my body was Royal.
CHAPTER IV
LOVE AND ENNUI
In speaking of one’s past it is difficult not to take a present point of view; and when I say that being a Royal person in Spain had its serious aspects—because I could not love or marry as a private person—I mean that it had those aspects as I look back upon it. At the time I was not aware of them. They were accepted by me as constituting the natural order of life. Long before I could begin to think of such things as love and marriage I had been schooled to the idea that I could have such relations only with Royal persons. Humanity was divided in my mind into three sexes; there were women, men of Royal birth, and a third sex, who were to me, as you might say, priests. Any affair of love with the latter was unthinkable—not only to me but to them. It never entered my mind, any more than it would with a priest. If it ever entered their minds, I could not know it, because they could not speak to me, even if they wished.
In the palace of Madrid, when the usher would take me to the antechamber of my brother’s apartments, I would always have an interval of waiting while word of my visit was being carried to the King. And during that interval there would usually be some young officers or aides-de-camp standing in another part of the room. Since they were Spaniards, and I was not hideous, if I glanced at them I found them trying to look romantic. If one of them was alone, he would either sigh “like a furnace,” as Shakespeare says, or try to look unutterable silences across the room. At first this embarrassed me. But when I grew reassured by the fact that none of them dared approach me or speak to me, I found it comical; and I used to watch them slyly to see whether they were going to be melancholy and sigh, or make lambent calf’s eyes at me in the best Spanish manner. Afterwards I would tell my brother, and he would laugh, because he knew the officers and enjoyed teasing them. It became one of the little jokes between us, that all his young aides were languishing their lives away in hopeless devotion to me. Later, some of them—unwilling, perhaps, to be merely amusing—announced that they were going to blow out their brains. I never heard that any did it; and I did not see what satisfaction it would have been to them if they had. I supposed that they came to the same conclusion themselves. After a while I learned that one does not take such threats of self-destruction seriously in Spain. They are only a form of mild attention paid to ladies by the gallantry that wishes to be dashing.
At luncheons, when the officers ate with us, even sighs were impossible; and they behaved like very good boys before the school-teacher. My own behaviour must have betrayed amused interest, for I remember that our mistress of the robes—called the “aya”—who is a sort of Court duenna, read me long lectures on the government of my eyes. When a man conversed with me I must not look directly at him. That look, in Spain, meant courtship. I must always look down, and just glance at him sidelong, under the ends of my eyelashes, demurely. The Spanish girls do it very well, but my eyes were not Spanish. I had the habit of direct gaze; and after repeated lectures from the aya I pretended that I had acquired a squint from trying to look sideways; and this annoyed the aya and made fun for my brother.
The Spanish girls are taught to regard men as some sort of wild animal, whom it is dangerous to meet unless one is well protected by chaperons; and they become as timid as Oriental girls, and, of course, as curious.
Sometimes in the evenings, when my sisters and I were with my brother in his apartments, he would have with him young men of the Court, friends of his own age, grandees’ sons and members of the foreign legations, who went shooting and hunting with him. I enjoyed talking and listening to them, much more than conversing with the young ladies of noble families who were invited to Court as companions to us Infantas. The men had travelled, and read, and met interesting people. The girls had had no experiences and no thoughts. They could talk only of their religion or of their fiancés.