[CHAPTER VI]
MADRID
Madrid Station was the usual dark barn into which the trains ran and where they rested, as the diligences rest beneath the barn of the coaching inn. One descended the steps of the carriage into gloom; found a dim porter whom one would never recognize again; made one's way amongst the towering, sniffling black Pargantua of locomotives; was fought for by an excited mob of cabmen, amongst whom one remained passive until a cabman dowered with more character than his fellows had managed to attract one's notice; and finally we were packed into a small, four-square omnibus, our luggage on the top, the driver and his tout on the box. A police official in a grey uniform halted us. He asked our names, our destination and warned us not to pay the driver more than five pesetas for the trip, including the luggage.
To-day was Sunday. We had, indeed, on getting up at Avila imagined it to be Saturday. We were leaving Avila expressly on a Saturday in order to be in Madrid for the great Sunday bullfight, for practically all bullfighting in Spain is reserved as a mild sport for Sunday afternoon, or for other days of Church festival. Unfortunately, we had learned on the train that it was not Saturday but Sunday. Somehow, we had mislaid a day. We had presented ourselves with a Wednesday or a Thursday or a Friday too many, and now Sunday had gone bang and the bullfight with it.
But in consequence our entry into Madrid had some of the dignity of a royal procession. We plunged, a shabby omnibus, into the flood of carriages which parade the parks of Madrid on bullfight occasions. There were doubtless ladies with high combs placed in their raven hair; with lustrous eyes glowing from the deep caverns of their eye sockets; with a waxy and sensuous flower hanging from their full-blooded lips; clad in mystery-lending mantilla and gorgeous shawl, over which the Orient has burst a splendour of silken blossom. There were, no doubt, such spectacles to see; there must have been; all the artists who paint Spain cannot lie. Yet I confess that we did not see them. Though we are beginning to be suspicious of Spanish painters, we will not assert that no such ladies drove in procession, tempting the lounging Spaniard with glances from eyes of melting jet.
We did not see them because the whole flood of carriages was plunged in a strange golden haze. Dusk had fallen and overhead signs of daylight showed purplish through the fog, but lower down it was quite dark, and through this haze of orange-gold particles, which drifted in the air as golden particles drift in a chemical solution, the lamps of the carriages threw long searchlights, arresting strange silhouettes of the coach-borne crowd, so that we made our first acquaintance with the people of Madrid merely as black shadows against a radiance of gold. It was, indeed, somewhat a prophetic introduction. These black shadows against the gold may stand as a figure for Spain. We think of Spain as the land of the last romance, whereas the Spaniard's real romance is money and the gaining of it. But this is a mixing of secondary and primary impressions. Before our eyes Madrid rolled forward, gloating in an aureate solution, accompanied by the shouts of coachmen and the blaring from aristocratic and impatient motor-cars. We sat looking out of the black windows of the omnibus with much of that childish delight which a shadowgraph theatre gives. In time, however, we began to cough. After a while longer we began to realize that this haze so exquisite in the lamplight was dust—dust.
We rolled along, manufacturing our halo as we went, until, coming out of the press of carriages into cobbled and ill-lit streets, our glory fell away from us and we rocked on, reflecting on this apt illustration of the old French proverb concerning beauty and suffering. Gradually we decided that we could have dispensed with this weird introduction to Madrid in order to have spared our throats.