By supreme effort, one of the sisters recovered her gravity. “We receive about half a baby a day, señora,” she said, sedately, and could not understand why the lady smiled!
That continual rudeness in the matter of staring and laughing at strangers was at first a great surprise to me—who had always heard of the extravagant politeness of the Spaniard. I came to know that he is polite only along circumscribed lines—until he knows you. After that, I believe that you could take him at the literal words of his lavish offers, and burn his house or dismantle it entirely without protest on his part. Though too poor to invite you to a meal, he will call at your hotel twice a day to leave flowers from his garden, and declare himself at your disposition; or to take you to drive in the Castellana. He will go to any amount of trouble to prepare small surprises for you: a box of sweets, that he has made especially; a bit of majolica he has heard you admire; an old fan that is an heirloom of his family: every day there is something new, some further token of his friendship and thought.
It is true that, even when able to afford it, he shows an Eastern exclusiveness about inviting you to his house. I know people who have lived in Madrid seventeen years without having been once inside the doors of some of their Spanish friends. But this is racial habit: the old Oriental tradition of the home being sacred to the family itself: not personal slight, or snobbishness. There is in it, however, a certain caution which offends the franker hospitality of the Anglo-Saxon. To go into petty detail, I for one have never been able to overcome my resentment of the brass peep-holes (in every Spanish door) through which the servant peers out at you, before he will let you in. I realize that my irritation is quite as childish as their precaution; but I cannot conquer my annoyance at the plain impudence of the thing.
The same is true of their boundless interest in one’s affairs. Peasants, shop-keepers, well-dressed ladies and gentlemen—everyone!—will gather round, to hear a simple question addressed to a policeman in the street. They take it for granted that no foreigner speaks Spanish, and when the contrary proves the case, their curiosity and amazement are increased ten-fold.
I was once in the office of a French typewriter company of Madrid, arranging to rent a machine. During the intervals in which the agent and I conversed in French he discussed my requirements, appearance, and probable profession with a postman, a delivery-boy, an officer who came in to buy pens, and the two young lady stenographers in the next room. In Spanish, of course, all this; which I, as a foreigner, could not possibly understand.
This happens over and over again, especially at pension tables, where one gleans astounding information as to the geography and customs of one’s country (from various good Spaniards who have never left their own), until a modest request for the salt—proffered in Castilian—throws the entire company into horrified confusion. Even then, they will go on to comment most candidly to one’s face on the peculiarities and generally inferior character of one’s countrymen. But if you turn the tables ever so discreetly, they retort in triumph: “Then why have you come to Spain? If your own country pleases you, why don’t you stay there?”
Travel for amusement or education is simply outside their comprehension—naturally enough, since it is outside the possibilities of most of them today as it was in the middle ages. We have already seen their ideas of other countries to be of the most naïve. I have been seriously congratulated by Madrileños on the privilege of beholding so fine a thoroughfare as the Castellana, such splendid shops as the handful scattered along the San Geronimo, such a wonderful building as the Opera House, which they fondly believe “the most beautiful in the world.” They are generously delighted for me, that after the primitive hotels I must have known in other countries I can enjoy for a while the magnificence of their modern “Palace.”
They, alas, are too poor to enjoy it. I think there is something almost tragic in this fact that the entire society of Madrid cannot support the very moderate charges of the one first class hotel in the city. When one thinks of the dozens of luxurious stopping-places in London, New York, and Paris—always crowded by a mob of vulgar people with their purses overflowing, it seems actually cruel that the vieille noblesse of the Spanish capital have no money for the simple establishment they admire with child-like extravagance. The old actor does so delight in pomp—of even the mildest variety; and his youthful shortsightedness has left him so pitiably unable to secure it, now in the beggardom of his old age.
Half a dozen years ago, the porter of a friend of mine in Madrid won a lottery prize of ten thousand dollars. No sooner had he come into this fabulous wealth, than he and his wife proceeded to rent a house on the Castellana, a box at the opera, another at the bull-ring; and of course the indispensable carriage and pair. The señor had his clubs and racers, the señora her jewels, and frocks from Paris; they amazed Madrid with their magnificence.
At the end of six months the ten thousand dollars were gone; and the couple went back to the porter’s lodge, where they have lived happily ever since. Could one make the last assertion of two people of any other race in the same circumstances? Certainly not of two Americans! But, of course, had they been Americans, they would promptly have invested the ten thousand dollars, and doubled it; in five years they would probably have been “millionaires from the West.” Not so the ingenuous Spaniards. With no thought for the morrow, they proceeded to outdo all competitors in making a gorgeous today; and, when that was done, retired without bitterness to rest on their laurels.