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.
Our friend Jesus Perez had given us an address appropriately enough in
the Place of the Angel. But there were three _pensions_ in the same
building and he had not discriminated. So I, leaving Jan to look after
the bus, went to explore, and knocking at random was brought face to
face with an old lady who had not a trace of the angelic in her
constitution. While she was grumpily and wilfully misunderstanding me,
insisting that the Señor for whom I was looking did not live there, a
crowd of well-fed persons sifted from the dining-room and stood in a
circle staring at me with cold-eyed curiosity. As they stared they all
picked their teeth. At last I forced understanding on her and she told
me in a surly voice that her _pension_ was full. The other two
_pensions_ were full also. It was explained to me that Madrid was
suffering from congestion, that never had such a season been
experienced.
So I retreated from the stairs and we held a council of distress in the
street. The driver of the bus, who did not indeed look like a very
competent judge, said that he knew of a good _pension_. By a series of
manoeuvres, about as complicated as the turning of a large ship in a
small river, he got his bus reversed and we set off again the way we had
come. But once more we met a refusal, backed by wide-eyed staring and
public tooth-picking.
We had the address of an hotel, as a last resource indeed, for it was
somewhat beyond our means, costing seventeen pesetas a day _en pension_.
So in despair we made our way to it, wondering whether the congestion
had spread from the eight peseta boarding-houses to the
seventeen-peseta hotels, and whether our first night in Madrid was to be
spent in the bus. We came back into the garishly lit main streets of
Madrid and at last the bus halted. There was no hotel front, and we
plunged between two shops along a passage from which photographs of the
beauties of Madrid showed exquisite sets of teeth from the showcases of
a society photographer. A narrow, twisting staircase--the lift was out
of order--spiralled us up to a sumptuous hotel decorated with mirrors
and white paint arranged with a Permanic taste. Rooms were to be had,
and so we resigned ourselves to luxury for a few days.
Luxury indeed it was. For our eight pesetas a day in Avila we had had as
much as we wanted. Here it was in proportion. We were expected to eat
our seventeen pesetas' worth a day. Course followed course until, more
than replete, we had to wave away almost the whole of the second half of
this truly Roman repast. The waiters were aghast. What? Not eat
seventeen pesetas worth when one had paid for it? Incredible! We gazed
about at our fellow diners and saw that we were unique. But then as a
rule our fellow diners surpassed us as much in girth as in appetite;
they had "excellent accommodations." Your true Spaniard adores his
dinner. There is a general superstition that love is the Spaniard's
prime passion. But I doubt it. For the once that we have been asked what
we think of Spanish beauty, we have been twenty times questioned about
our judgment of Spanish cooking.
Madrid at night. How much has one not dreamed of southern romance
beneath skies of ultramarine? But Madrid seems just like any other large
European city. It is Paris without the wit, Munich without the music. We
talk, of course, of first impressions. The first impressions of a town
are rarely national. Collective humanity is collective humanity
everywhere; has the same needs and devises the same methods of
satisfying them. Some needs Madrid supplies more blatantly than is done
in other places. The Latin is indifferent to noise and the Spaniard is
the most hardened of the Latin races. There seems to be no curb on the
cries of the street vendors. The consequence is that each shouts out his
wares in competition with his fellows; the louder the yell the more the
custom. The peculiar qualities of Spanish singing further stimulate to a
point of mordant acidity the Iberian voice. For a person of sensitive
hearing Madrid is intolerable: newspaper men, flower-merchants,
toothpick-sellers, and above all the lottery ticket vendors, scream
their wares with nerve-racking persistency; added to which, to make
pandemonium complete, the cab-drivers and their touts bellow and shout,
while the horns of the motor-cars are the most discordant that we have
ever heard.
As the night progressed from a stifling heat to a comparative coolness
the noise seemed to increase. At two o'clock in the morning we thought,
surely, it had reached its limit. And to some extent it had. One thanks
Heaven sometimes that the human machine runs down; and we, when the
"sweet sister of death" laid her hands upon newspaper and lottery ticket
sellers, sent a thanksgiving up towards the stars, a thanksgiving the
more sincere at the moment because it was silent. The diminution of
noise went on steadily until about three, and we imagined that Madrid
was going to sleep. It was, however, but a ruse of the subtle city. As
is well known, one can become used to a persistent or regularly repeated
noise, for Jan used to sleep sweetly close to the stamp battery of a
mine, the din of which was so deafening that the voice was inaudible,
even at the loudest shout; and dwellers near a railway line are but
little disturbed by the nightly trains. Madrid knew that in time we
would become accustomed to the human babel, in spite of its strident
note; so she substituted a fictitious silence torn into strips by the
sudden passage of motors which had taken advantage of the clearness of
the streets to put on full speed and also to cut off the silencer.
Irregularly these motors went by about one every five minutes. Each
silence was about long enough to let us reach the edge over which one
tumbles into sleep, and each roaring passage of a car jerked us back
into disgusted wakefulness. We arose to a very early breakfast, wishing
we had Mr. G. K. Chesterton at hand so that we could enter into an
argument with him about the beauties of liberty.
To retrace our steps for a moment, it was just about at the hither side
of the noise climax, that is, about 2.20 in the morning, that we got
back to our hotel. We found the street door shut and locked, and no bell
could we find to pull. We thumped on the door, but only a hollow,
drum-like echoing answered us. We were dismayed. We had got up early at
Avila, a train journey and discoverings in Madrid had worn us out, and
on the other side of this locked door our bed tempted us; for we were
not then aware that sleep was forbidden to us whether we got in or
stayed in the street. It seemed strange in Madrid, wide awake and noisy,
that our hotel should have locked up so early and should have shut us
out. Despairingly again we drummed on the door. We awakened sympathy in
a passer-by. A few words explained our plight. He whistled, and we
presently saw a man with a lantern in his hand and with an official cap
on his head coming towards us. Our helper explained and the official
unlocked the door, let us in, and locked the door behind us.
This wandering latchkey is the equivalent to our old night-watchman.
Amongst his duties is that of chanting out the hours of the night as
they pass--for the benefit of the sleepless--to which he adds the
condition of the weather. Since fully ninety-five per cent. of the
Spanish nocturnes are Whistlerian blue, he has earned the title of El
Sereno, or the serene. There is an advantage in this custom--one cannot
forget one's latchkey. The worst evil which can happen to one is that
one's latchkey may forget itself: but Spain is on the whole a sober
country.
A big town reveals its flavour but by degrees. Madrid, whatever its real
character may be, had hidden herself behind a veil--a veil of dust. That
golden aura which had enveloped our first vision was not a permanent
characteristic of the town. The dust hung in the air, rising higher than
the houses. From the outskirts, maybe one would have seen Madrid as it
were enclosed in a dome of dust. We marvelled that people could live in
such at atmosphere.
We had noticed that, in addition to its dustiness, Madrid was suffering
from a dreadful shortage of water. It was, of course, July, and one
might expect some famine on the high and arid tableland of Spain, but we
wondered that so great a city could have arisen with so meagre a water
supply. At street corners queues of tired women and children waited for
hot hours with buckets, pails, jugs and amphoras. Soldiers with a hose
pipe from which trickled a paltry stream of water filled the vessels one
by one. There was gaiety and bad temper, giggling and quarrelling
amongst the women.
"This," said we, "is a primitive city."
In the public gardens water-carts were standing, and crowds of men were
baling water up from the decorative ponds.
"A real famine," said we, "could not be worse than this."
This was in fact the case. Madrid is supplied from the mountains by an
ancient aqueduct. The Spaniard has a principle of interfering with
nothing until the last moment; the ideals of liberty are carried so far
in Spain that they apply to inanimate objects as well as human beings.
Thus, if the aqueduct wishes to break, it is allowed to do so. Panic
ensues. The government is criticized, but words hurt nobody. The
aqueduct had given way a few days before our arrival. Had it not been
for the generosity of a nobleman who turned a private water supply into
the conduits of Madrid, we would have found not calamity but
catastrophe.
Madrid was unsavoury enough. The breakdown of the water-supply entails
also the failure of the drainage system. In a land of wine one might
dispense with water as a mere drink; but to dispense with flushed drains
in a semi-tropical climate is impossible.
[Illustration]
One late afternoon we were in our bedroom, having taken advantage of the
quiet which reigns from one p.m. till five, (for we got no other sleep
during out stay), we heard a faint strange murmur which seemed to be
drawing nearer. We went to the balcony and looked out. The sound was
coming from the direction of the Puerto del Sol, the sun's gate, the
torrid centre of Madrid so well named. The sound drew nearer. Soon it
shaped itself into a word murmur from thousands of throats:
"Agua, agua, agua."
The word passed us and fled down the streets, sweeping before the
hesitating trickle which crept along the gutters. With the word a
communal shiver of delight ran through the town, like a sort of physical
earthquake. Before six o'clock the road men were dragging their hoses
about the street, and the rising damp was dragging the dust out of the
air.