If you choose to make your visit to Toledo an episode of your stay in
Madrid, you have still to choose between going at eight in the morning
and arriving back at five in the evening, or going at five one evening
and coming back at the same hour the next. In either case you will have
two hours’ jolting each way over the roughest bit of railroad in the
world, and if your _mozo,_ before you could stop him, has selected for
your going a compartment over the wheels, you can never be sure that
he has done worse for you than you will have done for yourself when you
come back in a compartment between the trucks. However you go or come,
you remain in doubt whether you have been jolting over rails jointed
at every yard, or getting on without any track over a cobble-stone
pavement. Still, if the compartment is wide and well cushioned, as it is
in Spain nearly always, with free play for your person between roof and
floor and wall and wall; and if you go at five o’clock you have from
your windows, as long as the afternoon light lasts, while you bound
and rebound, glimpses of far-stretching wheat-fields, with nearer
kitchen-gardens rich in beets and cabbages, alternating with purple and
yellow patches of vineyard.
I
I find from my ever-faithful note-book that the landscape seemed to grow
drearier as we got away from Madrid, but this may have been the effect
of the waning day: a day which at its brightest had been dim from
recurrent rain and incessant damp. The gloom was not relieved by the
long stops at the frequent stations, though the stops were good for
getting one’s breath, and for trying to plan greater control over
one’s activities when the train should be going on again. The stations
themselves were not so alluring that we were not willing to get away
from them; and we were glad to get away from them by train, instead of
by mule-team over the rainy levels to the towns that glimmered along the
horizon two or three miles off. There had been nothing to lift the
heart in the sight of two small boys ready perched on one horse, or of
a priest difficultly mounting another in his long robe. At the only
station which I can remember having any town about it a large number of
our passengers left the train, and I realized that they were commuters
like those who might have been leaving it at some soaking suburb of Long
Island or New Jersey. In the sense of human brotherhood which the fact
inspired I was not so lonely as I might have been, when we resumed
our gloomy progress, with all that punctilio which custom demands of
a Spanish way-train. First the station-master rings a bell of alarming
note hanging on the wall, and the _mozos_ run along the train shutting
the car doors. After an interval some other official sounds a pocket
whistle, and then there is still time for a belated passenger to find
his car and scramble aboard. When the ensuing pause prolongs itself
until you think the train has decided to remain all day, or all night,
and several passengers have left it again, the locomotive rouses itself
and utters a peremptory screech. This really means going, but your doubt
has not been fully overcome when the wheels begin to bump under your
compartment, and you set your teeth and clutch your seat, and otherwise
prepare yourself for the renewal of your acrobatic feats. I may not
get the order of the signals for departure just right, but I am sure
of their number. Perhaps the Sud-Express starts with less, but the
Sud-Express is partly French.
It had been raining intermittently all day; now that the weary old day
was done the young night took up the work and vigorously devoted itself
to a steady downpour which, when we reached our hotel in Toledo, had
taken the role of a theatrical tempest, with sudden peals of thunder and
long loud bellowing reverberations and blinding flashes of lightning,
such as the wildest stage effects of the tempest in the Catskills when
Rip Van Winkle is lost would have been nothing to. Foreboding the inner
chill of a Spanish hotel on such a day, we had telegraphed for a fire in
our rooms, and our eccentricity had been interpreted in spirit as well
as in letter. It was not the habitual hotel omnibus which met us at the
station, but a luxurious closed carriage commanded by an interpreter who
intuitively opened our compartment door, and conveyed us dry and warm
to our hotel, in every circumstance of tender regard for our comfort,
during the slow, sidelong uphill climb to the city midst details of
historic and romantic picturesqueness which the lightning momently
flashed in sight. From our carriage we passed as in a dream between the
dress-coated head waiter and the skull-capped landlord who silently and
motionlessly received us in the Gothic doorway, and mounted by a stately
stair from a beautiful glass-roofed _patio,_ columned round with airy
galleries, to the rooms from which a smoky warmth gushed out to welcome
us.
The warmth was from the generous blaze kindled in the fireplace against
our coming, and the smoke was from the crevices in a chimneypiece not
sufficiently calked with newspapers to keep the smoke going up the flue.
The fastidious may think this a defect in our perfect experience, but we
would not have had it otherwise, if we could, and probably we could not.
We easily assumed that we were in the palace of some haughty hidalgo,
adapted to the uses of a modern hotel, with a magical prevision which
need not include the accurate jointing of a chimneypiece. The storm
bellowed and blazed outside, the rain strummed richly on the _patio_
roof which the lightning illumined, and as we descended that stately
stair, with its walls ramped and foliaged over with heraldic fauna
and flora, I felt as never before the disadvantage of not being still
fourteen years old.
But you cannot be of every age at once and it was no bad thing to be
presently sitting down in my actual epoch at one of those excellent
Spanish dinners which no European hotel can surpass and no American
hotel can equal. It may seem a descent from the high horse, the winged
steed of dreaming, to have been following those admirable courses with
unflagging appetite, as it were on foot, but man born of woman is hungry
after such a ride as ours from Madrid; and it was with no appreciable
loss to our sense of enchantment that we presently learned from our
host, waiting skull-capped in the _patio,_ that we were in no real
palace of an ancient hidalgo, but were housed as we found ourselves by
the fancy of a rich nobleman of Toledo whom the whim had taken to equip
his city with a hotel of poetic perfection. I am afraid I have forgotten
his name; perhaps I should not have the right to parade it here if I
remembered it; but I cannot help saluting him brother in imagination,
and thanking him for one of the rarest pleasures that travel, even
Spanish travel, has given me.