In all of which the good couple may have been wiser than they seem. Being true children of their race—that is, without the first instincts for “making money”—they would naturally have taken what they had won, and stretched it carefully over the remaining half century of their lives. So they could have existed in genteel poverty without working. As it was, they had their fling—such a one as to set Madrid by the ears; they are still famous for their unparalleled prodigality; and they jog along in the service to which they were born, utterly content if at the end of the day they have an hour or two in which to gloat over their one-time splendour. When I think of the enforced scrimping and soul-shrivelling calculation of the average Madrileño, I am always glad to remember two who threw their bonnets over the mill, and had what Americans call “one grand good time.”
It is impossible to conclude this cursory glance at some of the more striking of Spanish characteristics without mention of the two finest: honesty and lack of self-interest. They go hand in hand throughout this country of rock-rooted impulse, and are forever surprising one used to the modern rule of look-sharp-or-be-worsted. My first shock was in the Rastro (the old Thieves’ Market of Madrid), when an old man candidly informed me that the chain I admired was not of gold. It had every appearance of gold, and I should have bought it as such; but the shabby old salesman shook his head, and gave it to me gladly for twenty cents.
As Taine tells us, the Spanish are not practical; which endows them, among other things, with the unprofitable quality of honour. In Toledo, just as I was taking the train, I discovered that I had lost my watch. It occurred to me that I might have dropped it in the cab our party had had for a long drive that afternoon; but when the hotel proprietor telephoned to the stables, he found that the cab had not yet returned. “However,” he told me confidently, “tomorrow the cosaria goes to Madrid, and if the watch is found she can bring it to you.”
The cosaria (literally the “thing” woman) is an institution peculiar to Spain; she goes from town to town delivering parcels, produce, and what not—in short, she is the express company. Of course I never expected to see my watch again, but before six o’clock of the following day the cosaria appeared at my door in Madrid with the article lost in Toledo—seventy miles away. The charge for her services was two pesetas (forty cents). When I suggested a reward for the coachman, she replied with amazement that it would be to insult him! I have visions of an American driver running risk of such “insult.” He would have been at the pawnshop, and got his ten dollars long since.
An American friend of mine who conducts a school for girls in Madrid tells of a still rarer experience. One day her butcher came to her in great distress. He had been going over his books, and he found that the price his assistant had been charging the school for soup-bones (daily delivered) was twice what it should have been. This, said he with abject regret, had been going on unknown to him since the first of the year; he therefore owed the señora nine hundred pesetas (one hundred and eighty dollars) for bones, and begged her to accept this sum on the spot, together with his profoundest apologies.
I call such experiences rare, yet they are of everyday occurrence in Spain; so that one knows it was not here that Byron said: “I never trust manners, for I once had my pocket picked by the civilest gentleman I ever met with!” In Spain, manners and morals have an original habit of walking out together; and one need not, as in other countries, fear a preponderance of the former as probable preclusion of the latter. That lack of the practical sense, which we wise analysts deplore, has its engaging side when it brings back our watch, or saves us paying a gold price for brass.
In the matter of servants, too, one is allured by a startling readiness on their part to do as much as, even more than, they are paid for. After the surly thanks and sour looks of the New York or London menial for anything under a quarter, the broad smile of the Spanish for five cents is quite an episode in one’s life. The breath-taking part of it is that the smile is still forthcoming when the five cents is not; this is frightfully disturbing to one’s nicely arranged opinions of the domestic class.
But it makes living in Madrid very agreeable. Like the rest of their countrymen, servants before they know you are inclined to be suspicious, and polite only along circumscribed lines, but once they have accepted you your position in their eyes is unimpeachable, and the service they will render has no limits. This standard of judgment of a very old country: the standard, throughout all classes, of judgment of the individual for what he proves himself to be, is extremely interesting as opposed to the instantaneous judgment and unquestioning acceptance of him as he outwardly appears to be by the very young country of America. To the American it is a disgrace to serve—or, at least, to admit that he is serving; to the Spaniard it is a disgrace not to serve, with his utmost powers and grace, anyone worthy of recognition whatsoever.
Wherefore Spanish maids and men are the most loyal and devoted the world over. They will run their feet off for you all day long, and sit up half the night too if you will let them, finishing some task in which they are interested. When you are ill, they make the most thoughtful of nurses, never sparing themselves if it is to give you even a fractional amount of comfort. And to all your thanks they return a deprecating “for nothing—for nothing.” They have never heard of “an eight-hour day”; the Union of Domestic Labour would be to them a title in Chinese; yet they find life worth living. They are even—breathe it not among the moderns!—contented; still more strange, they are considered, and whenever possible spared, by their unmodern masters and mistresses.
It is the civilization of an unpractical people; a people not in terror of giving something for nothing, but eager always to give more. They are, I believe, the one people to whom money—in the human relations of life—never occurs. And so, of course, they are despised by other peoples—for their poverty, their lack of “push.” Nowadays we worship the genius of Up-To-Date: his marvellous invention, his lightning calculation and keen move; his sweating, struggling, superman’s performance, day by day—and his final triumph. We disdain the old actor of mere grandiloquence, content to dream, passive in his corner.