All pleasures, mixed or unmixed, must end, and the qualified joy of our
drive through San Sebastian came to a close on our return to our hotel
well within the second hour, almost within its first half. When I
proposed paying our driver for the exact time, he drooped upon his box
and, remembering my remorse in former years for standing upon my just
rights in such matters, I increased the fare, peseta by peseta, till his
sinking spirits rose, and he smiled gratefully upon me and touched his
brave red cap as he drove away. He had earned his money, if racking his
invention for objects of interest in San Sebastian was a merit. At the
end we were satisfied that it was a well-built town with regular blocks
in the modern quarter, and not without the charm of picturesqueness
which comes of narrow and crooked lanes in the older parts. Prescient of
the incalculable riches before us, we did not ask much of it, and we got
all we asked. I should be grateful to San Sebastian, if for nothing
else than the two very Spanish experiences I had there. One concerned a
letter for me which had been refused by the bankers named in my letter
of credit, from a want of faith, I suppose, in my coming. When I did
come I was told that I would find it at the post-office. That would be
well enough when I found the post-office, which ought to have been easy
enough, but which presented certain difficulties in the driving rain of
our first afternoon. At last in a fine square I asked a fellow-man in
my best conversational Spanish where the post-office was, and after a
moment’s apparent suffering he returned, “Do you speak English?” “Yes.”
I said, “and I am so glad you do.” “Not at all. I don’t speak anything
else. Great pleasure. There is the post-office,” and it seemed that I
had hardly escaped collision with it. But this was the beginning, not
the end, of my troubles. When I showed my card to the _poste restante_
clerk, he went carefully through the letters bearing the initial of my
name and denied that there was any for me. We entered into reciprocally
bewildering explanations, and parted altogether baffled. Then, at
the hotel, I consulted with a capable young office-lady, who tardily
developed a knowledge of English, and we agreed that it would be well to
send the _chico_ to the post-office for it. The _chico,_ corresponding
in a Spanish hotel to a _piccolo_ in Germany or a page in England, or
our own now evanescing bell-boy, was to get a _peseta_ for bringing me
the letter. He got the _peseta,_ though he only brought me word that
the authorities would send the letter to the hotel by the postman that
night. The authorities did not send it that night, and the next morning
I recurred to my bankers. There, on my entreaty for some one who could
meet my Spanish at least half-way in English, a manager of the bank came
out of his office and reassured me concerning the letter which I had
now begun to imagine the most important I had ever missed. Even while we
talked the postman came in and owned having taken the letter back to the
office. He voluntarily promised to bring it to the bank at one o’clock,
when I hastened to meet him. At that hour every one was out at lunch; I
came again at four, when everybody had returned, but the letter was not
delivered; at five, just before the bank closed, the letter, which had
now grown from a _carta_ to a _cartela,_ was still on its way. I left
San Sebastian without it; and will it be credited that when it was
forwarded to me a week later at Madrid it proved the most fatuous
missive imaginable, wholly concerning the writer’s own affairs and none
of mine?
I cannot guess yet why it was withheld from me, but since the incident
brought me that experience of Spanish politeness, I cannot grieve for
it. The young banker who left his region of high finance to come out and
condole with me, in apologizing for the original refusal of my letter,
would not be contented with so little. Nothing would satisfy him but
going with me, on my hinted purpose, and inquiring with me at the
railroad office into the whole business of circular tickets, and even
those kilometric tickets which the Spanish railroads issue to such
passengers as will have their photographs affixed to them for the
prevention of transference. As it seemed advisable not to go to this
extreme till I got to Madrid, my kind young banker put himself at my
disposal for any other service I could imagine from him; but I searched
myself in vain for any desire, much less necessity, and I parted from
him at the door of his bank with the best possible opinion of the
Basques. I suppose he was a Basque; at any rate, he was blond, which
the Spaniards are mostly not, and the Basques often are. Now I am sorry,
since he was so kind, that I did not get him to read me the Basque
inscription on the front of his bank, which looked exactly like that on
the bank at Bayonne; I should not have understood it, but I should have
known what it sounded like, if it sounded like anything but Basque.
Everybody in San Sebastian seemed resolved to outdo every other in
kindness. In a shop where we endeavored to explain that we wanted to get
a flat cap which should be both Basque and red, a lady who was buying
herself a hat asked in English if she could help us. When we gladly
answered that she could, she was silent, almost to tears, and it
appeared that in this generous offer of aid she had exhausted her
whole stock of English. Her mortification, her painful surprise, at the
strange catastrophe, was really pitiable, and we hastened to escape
from it to a shop across the street. There instantly a small boy rushed
enterprisingly out and brought back with him a very pretty girl who
spoke most of the little French which has made its way in San Sebastian
against the combined Basque and Spanish, and a cap of the right flatness
and redness was brought. I must not forget, among the pleasures done us
by the place, the pastry cook’s shop which advertised in English “Tea
at all Hours,” and which at that hour of our afternoon we now found so
opportune, that it seemed almost personally attentive to us as the only
Anglo-Saxon visitors in town. The tea might have been better, but it was
as good as it knew how; and the small boy who came in with his mother
(the Spanish mother seldom fails of the company of a small boy) in her
moments of distraction succeeded in touching with his finger all the
pieces of pastry except those we were eating.