But something, possibly my presence, deterred the Spaniards from singing. They were shy as a group of schoolboys. One at last began to chant in a high quavering falsetto, but before the first half of his copla was ended he broke down into a laugh of hysterical shyness.
"Why then," cried Perez, "I'll have to sing myself, and Heaven knows I've got no voice."
The Spaniard believes that any singing is better than no singing. One of his chief pursuits in life is that of happiness—"allègre" he calls it. This allègre is produced not by perfect results but by evidence of good intentions. He would rather have a bad player who plays from his heart than a good player who plays for his pocket. Any singing, then, so long as it is of the right nature, will suffice, no matter what its musical effect. Perez's singing had allègre, but no music. He lowed like a calf, rising up into strange throaty hoarseness like a barrow merchant who has been crying his goods all day, and descending into dim growls of deep notes. But even he at last tired; and after Madame had been yawning for some while, after the last bottle of wine had been drained of its last drops, we slipped out one by one into the moonlit streets of Paris and said our farewells on the Boulevard
[CHAPTER III]
THE FRONTIER
I wonder what Charlemagne would have done if one had whisked him down from Paris to the Spanish Frontier in something under twenty hours? Probably the hero would have been paralysed with terror during the journey and would have revenged himself upon the magician by means of a little stake party.
But what would have been magic and miracle to Charlemagne remains in one's mind as a jumble—the interior of a second-class carriage; antimacassars; an adolescent who ate lusciously a basket of peaches, thereby reminding us that French peaches ripen early in June; intrusive knees and superfluous legs; an obese man who pinched my knee in his sleep, probably from habit; touches of indigestion which made one fidget, and in the dawn a little excitement roused by observing the turpentine tapping operations at work on the pine-trees by the side of the railroad—cemented together by the thick atmosphere of a summer's night enclosed between shut windows.
It is a strange fact that the more perfect do we make travelling, the more tedious does it become—I wonder whether the same may not apply to almost all progress in civilization.