Court Life From Within

by Infanta of Spain Eulalia

The heat was so great on my first night in the palace that I could not sleep, and being by no means fat, and my bed being without springs—just the stretched canvas of a “petate” fastened on a bed frame—I ached with the hard discomforts of it. At two in the morning I demanded a mattress. My maid sent for one. After a half-hour of waiting a young aide-de-camp appeared, in full uniform, and when I asked why he had come, he replied: “But it is I who have made your bed; if it is wrong, I must fix it.” I roared. He explained that in order to have the bed prepared with all possible care for me, it had been decided that an officer should make it. I told him to send me a mattress, and go back to his sleep. My maid, a simple old soul, was in a state of distraction. “My poor Infanta! My poor Infanta!” she kept wailing. “What will become of her, with no one but these stupid men to look after her!”

When the mattress arrived we arranged it ourselves, and I settled down again; but it made the bed so much hotter that I could not sleep any better than before; and I did not dare to make any more demands for fear of disturbing the officer again. At seven in the morning a deafening uproar of military music suddenly broke out in the salon that adjoined my bedroom, and my maid went wild with panic, crossing and blessing herself and saying frantic prayers. I hurried into a dressing-gown and opened my door on a German regimental band that had received a cable from the Kaiser to serenade me with the traditional “Guten Morgen,” and had marched at once on the palace as if they were going to take a fortress, and were now blowing their trumpets and beating their drums with an obedient diligence that seemed likely to crack the walls. None of the palace servants had understood what this was for; and these servants, by a horrible custom not uncommon in parts of Spain, were convicts who wore leg-chains and worked in the palace as in a prison, going about in livery and bare feet, and dragging their chains on the marble floors. They were as bewildered as my maid, and they were scuttling around as helplessly. As soon as I saw the uniforms that the musicians wore I guessed what had happened; and, the noise drowning my voice, I tried, by smiling and bowing, to reassure the general panic. When the music stopped I got things straightened out, but while it lasted we were a scene from a madhouse or a theatrical burlesque. I went back to my mattress feeling that my first night in Havana had not been too tame.

My day had been more successful, because of a curious accident that had made my arrival almost triumphant. My maid, as we neared the shore, had packed all my gowns but the one I had decided to wear—a striped gown of blue and white, around the collar of which the dressmaker had put a red edging. When I came on deck in it, some one protested at once: “But, Your Royal Highness, that is the uniform of the insurgents!” It seemed impossible, but it was so: they wore just such a blue-and-white stripe with red facings. There was consternation. My trunks had been taken from my state-room. We were nearing shore. No one seemed to know what to do. And while we delayed, talking and arguing, the boat proceeded. It was soon too late to do anything, and I said: “Never mind; it will not matter. No one will notice it.”

But they did. They not only noticed it, but they supposed that I had worn it purposely with I do not know what idea of pleasing the people or showing that the Throne of Spain was above the quarrels of the factions in the island. It aroused incredible enthusiasm. And after that beginning I was received everywhere with the honours of a national hero. Whenever I drove out my carriage was showered with pamphlets of loyal congratulations and poems and panegyrics. At a bullfight given in my honour, not having thought to bring a present for the torero when he made his speech to me from the arena, I threw him one of my finger-rings; he was offered huge sums for it, but refused to sell it, as if it had been Aladdin’s. Everything I did was accepted as admirable—whether I rode horseback at the military review when I wanted the exercise, or received in my arms a little girl who slid down a sort of fire-escape at an exhibition of the volunteer fire brigade, when I was afraid that she might fall and break her neck in my honour if some one did not catch her.

It was evident that I was making “a personal success.” But as soon as I talked to men who knew the situation in Cuba, I was convinced that the success was only personal. For too long had Spain been sending out officials to Cuba who had no ambition but to fill their pockets at the expense of the Cuban people; and the Cubans had made up their minds that they would endure it no longer. In administrative circles, every one who was candid confessed that “it was too late.” In Spain, the people, though the victims of the same sort of corruption, had the consolation of knowing that the government was their own; here the corruption was imposed on them by a government in which they were not represented. In Spain the army could be used to suppress armed rebellion; but here, the army itself was so enfeebled by corruption, so badly led, so wasted by yellow fever, that it was nearly useless. At a dinner to the influential men of the colony I had to change the conversation several times in order to avoid hearing Spain abused. Leaders of both political parties, whether they were for or against Spain, were of the one mind: “It was too late.” Cuba was determined to be free of a maladministration which no sensible person could blame her for refusing to endure. All the sensible people were aware, at last, that the conditions ought to have been corrected, and one could only say to one’s self: “It’s too bad you didn’t think of it sooner.” As we sailed away from the harbour of Havana I was oppressed with the conviction that the Crown of Spain, in my person, was saluting for the last time the Spanish flag flying over that fortress. Cuba was gone.

Steaming northward, the weather turned delightfully cold, and I revelled in it, reviving myself after the strenuously exhausting days of our crowded week in Havana. When we picked up our pilot off Sandy Hook I was on the upper deck, promenading happily in the chill wind in light clothes, and the pilot remarked to one of the boat’s officers that it “was dangerous for that young girl” to be exposed in such a way to such weather. He was told that I was “the Spanish Infanta,” and he laughed uproariously at the idea; and the more seriously the officer assured him of it the more he enjoyed the joke. I saw him looking at me and laughing, so I inquired what was the matter; and when I found out I was slightly puzzled.

His amusement proved to be typical of my whole reception in the United States. As one of the newspapers put it, they had expected a “big, dark Spanish princess with a black moustache,” and it was with a tickled surprise that they found me “like any of the girls you see walking down Fifth Avenue.” Their pleased curiosity was reflected in the accounts that the reporters gave of me. No conceivable personal detail escaped them. One reporter even discovered that I had a gold crown on one of my back teeth, and I was mystified to know how he could have seen it. Surely my smile was not so broad as all that! I tried myself before a mirror. No! By no possible grimace could I expose that tooth. I remained mystified. I do still.

The amusement, however, was not altogether on their side. The newspapers had not prepared me for this familiar but kindly tone of the American Press; and the people of European countries had not the simple benevolence of the curiosity that brought the smiling crowds to greet me in the United States. The American young girl is the spoiled darling of the nation, and they were all as willing to spoil me—and I was willing to be spoiled—by their almost affectionate and chivalrous desire to give me “a good time.”

I cannot pretend that I saw anything at all of the problems of government in the country—nothing of the poverty, of the industrial exploitation, of the inequalities of opportunity and the control by the moneyed classes, of which we have since come to hear so much in all the kingdoms and republics and democracies of this changing world. I was merely a caller in the parlour. I knew nothing of the family life in the house, much less of the difficulties below-stairs.

We did not land at New York, but at Jersey City, where a special train was waiting to carry us to Washington. It would have taken us in Spain twenty-four hours to go the distance; we covered it in five hours, and I did not feel shaken. In Spain, if luncheon had been served us on the train it would have been “to kill time”; here it was served us “to save time.” One was struck at once by the busyness of the life and its efficiency. We had been caught up by an organisation that transported us, fed us, housed us, delivered us into the hands of a host or at the doors of an entertainment, returned us to our hotel, took us on excursions, provided us with drives, protected us from intrusion, conducted us through crowds, intelligently, suavely, without any hitch, comfortably, almost invisibly, with a foresight that seemed to provide for every contingency that could happen, and to be prepared for any change of plan that we could wish. And the spectacle of the life, through which we hurried, had the same air of having conquered the material agents of existence to the same end; namely, that every one should get as much as possible done in a day with as little friction as possible in the mechanical means of doing it.