We were very glad indeed to get to Madrid, though dismayed by
apprehensions of the _octroi_ which we felt sure awaited us. We recalled
the behavior of the amiable officer of Valladolid who bumped our baggage
about on the roof of our omnibus, and we thought that in Madrid such
an officer could not do less than shatter our boxes and scatter their
contents in the streaming street. What was then our surprise, our
joy, to find that in Madrid there was no _octroi_ at all, and that the
amiable _mozos_ who took our things hardly knew what we meant when we
asked for it. At Madrid they scarcely wanted our tickets at the gate of
the station, and we found ourselves in the soft embrace of modernity,
so dear after the feudal rigors of Old Castile, when we mounted into a
motor-bus and sped away through the spectacular town, so like Paris,
so like Rome as to have no personality of its own except in this
similarity, and never stopped till the liveried service swarmed upon us
at the door of the Hotel Ritz.
Here the modernity which had so winningly greeted us at the station
welcomed us more and consolingly. There was not only steam-heating, but
the steam was on! It wanted but a turn of the hand at the radiators, and
the rooms were warm. The rooms themselves responded to our appeal
and looked down into a silent inner court, deaf to the clatter of the
streets, and sleep haunted the very air, distracted, if at all, by the
instant facility and luxury of the appliances. Was it really in Spain
that a metallic tablet at the bed-head invited the wanderer to call with
one button for the _camerero,_ another for the _camerera,_ and another
for the _mozo,_ who would all instantly come speaking English like so
many angels? Were we to have these beautiful chambers for a humble two
dollars and forty cents a day; and if it was true, why did we ever
leave them and try for something ever so much worse and so very little
cheaper? Let me be frank with the reader whom I desire for my friend,
and own that we were frightened from the Eitz Hotel by the rumor of
Eitz prices. I paid my bill there, which was imagined with scrupulous
fullness to the last possible _centimo,_ and so I may disinterestedly
declare that the Eitz is the only hotel in Madrid where you get the
worth of your money, even when the money seems more but scarcely is so.
In all Spain I know of only two other hotels which may compare with it,
and these are the English hotels, one at Ronda and one at Algeciras. If
I add falteringly the hotel where we stayed a night in Toledo and the
hotel where we abode a fortnight in Seville, I heap the measure of merit
and press it down.
We did not begin at once our insensate search for another hotel in
Madrid: but the sky had cleared and we went out into the strange capital
so uncharacteristically characteristic, to find tea at a certain cafe
we had heard of. It was in the Calle de Alcala (a name which so richly
stimulates the imagination), and it looked out across this handsome
street, to a club that I never knew the name of, where at a series of
open windows was a flare of young men in silk hats leaning out on their
elbows and letting no passing fact of the avenue escape them. It was
worth their study, and if I had been an idle young Spaniard, or an
idle old one, I would have asked nothing better than to spend my Sunday
afternoon poring from one of those windows on my well-known world of
Madrid as it babbled by. Even in my quality of alien, newly arrived and
ignorant of that world, I already felt its fascination.
Sunday in Spain is perhaps different from other days of the week to
the Spanish sense, but to the traveler it is too like them to be
distinguishable except in that guilty Sabbath consciousness which is
probably an effect from original sin in every Protestant soul. The
casual eye could not see but that in Madrid every one seemed as much or
as little at work as on any other day. My own casual eye noted that the
most picturesquely evident thing in the city was the country life which
seemed so to pervade it. In the Calle de Alcala, flowing to the Prado
out of the Puerta del Sol, there passed a current of farm-carts and
farm-wagons more conspicuous than any urban vehicles, as they jingled
by, with men and women on their sleigh-belled donkeys, astride or atop
the heavily laden panniers. The donkeys bore a part literally leading in
all the rustic equipages, and with their superior intellect found a way
through the crowds for the string-teams of the three or four large mules
that followed them in harness. Whenever we saw a team of mules without
this sage guidance we trembled for their safety; as for horses, no team
of them attempted the difficult passage, though ox-trains seemed able to
dispense with the path-finding donkeys.
To be sure, the horses abounded in the cabs, which were mostly bad, more
or less. It is an idiosyncrasy of the cabs in Madrid that only the open
victorias have rubber tires; if you go in a coupe you must consent to
be ruthlessly bounced over the rough pavements on wheels unsoftened. It
“follows as the night the day” that the coupe is not in favor, and that
in its conservative disuse it accumulates a smell not to be acquired out
of Spain. One such vehicle I had which I thought must have been stabled
in the house of Cervantes at Valladolid, and rushed on the Sud-Express
for my service at Madrid; the stench in it was such that after a short
drive to the house of a friend I was fain to dismiss it at a serious
loss in pesetas and take the risk of another which might have been as
bad. Fortunately a kind lady intervened with a private carriage and a
coachman shaved that very day, whereas my poor old cabman, who was of
one and the same smell as his cab, had not been shaved for three days.