But as soon as we arrived at the Spanish port of Santander I forgot everything in the excitement of a reception that amounted to a carnival. With a staff of officers and dignitaries in uniform, and a troop of cavalry as escort, we were driven in an open carriage, drawn by four horses, through streets of which I could not see the fronts of the houses—they were so covered with the reds and yellows of flags and bunting that were dazzling in the vivid sunlight of Spain. There were crowds on the pavement, in the windows, on the balconies, and even on the house-tops; and they pelted us gaily with flowers tied in nosegays with weighted stems so that they might be accurately thrown. They threw at us doves with their feet tied to long strings, so that they could flutter but not escape. We warded off the flowers with our parasols, and standing up in the carriage I caught at the doves, while my mother, who feared nothing in the world, kept crying out, in a nervous terror, that she would faint if one of the birds touched her with its flutterings. She had the sort of horror of them flying that one has of bats. And this excited me. And the more excited I became, the more the crowd laughed and cheered and pelted us. If Spain were going to be all like that, I should be happy. It seemed impossible that these could be the same people who had driven my mother away with hisses. The realisation that they were truly the same made it seem, for the moment, that we were all playing a part in a spectacle without sincerity. The thought worried me as it passed.
We were being driven to the cathedral of Santander, where a Mass was to be celebrated and the Te Deum sung in thanksgiving for our return; and there, at the church door, the bishop in his robes waited for us under a canopy borne on poles by four young priests—the sort of canopy that he walks under in processions of the Corpus Christi, when he carries the Host through the streets. My mother, my two sisters, and I were taken under this canopy with him, as if we were something sacred; and we were solemnly escorted, by priests and acolytes, with music and singing and candles and incense, up the aisle to the sanctuary, where four throne-like chairs had been prepared for us before the altar. As I watched the priests and the people, I wondered whether they were sincere in this appearance of accepting us as sanctified by some sort of divine right.
From the cathedral we were taken to an official reception at the Mairie, and then to the Royal train that my brother had sent to bring us to Madrid; and we were started on our railroad journey with cheering and congratulations, in great state, among officers of the Court and personages of the Government. It was a journey that lasted all night, and the train was stopped at every station so that we might smile and bow to the crowd. At first I enjoyed it; it was exciting. But when it grew dark and I was tired and wanted to sleep, I found I had to wake up to be shown to the people, who came even in the middle of the night to see us pass. I rebelled. My mother insisted. “Very well,” I said, “I’ll make silly faces at them, and they’ll think you have an idiot for a daughter.” My mother was furious, but she knew that I would do it, so she left me alone, and I slept.
I had learned that we were not going direct to Madrid, but to the palace of the Escurial, in the mountains, a little distance from the capital. It was not considered wise that my mother should go to Madrid, because her presence there might encourage
The King’s Study in Escurial
the formation of a party in her favour as a rival to her son, and because it was necessary to avoid any appearance that the King was taking directions from her in affairs of State—in short, because the men who had recalled my brother were willing to have my mother and her children in Spain, but were not willing to have her rule there. This fact, for me, rather took away the sweet odour of sincerity from the incense that had been burned for us; but it did not seem to make any difference to my mother, who accepted such considerations as matters of course.
My brother met our train at a station some distance from Madrid, and we had a little family reunion that was very happy. He was so glad to have us and we to have him. My mother insisted that he must scold me for threatening to make faces at the people, but he laughed and would not. He joked and chatted gaily with me, as we used to in the old school days that seemed already so far away; and he promised that in a little time he would be able to have us with him in Madrid, where we should be very jolly together.