It seems a duty every Protestant owes his heresy to go and see
how dismally the arch-enemy of heresy housed his true faith in the
palace-tomb-and-church of the Escorial. If the more light-minded tourist
shirks this act of piety, he makes a mistake which he will repent
afterward in vain. The Escorial is, for its plainness, one of the two
or three things worthiest seeing among the two or three hundred things
worth seeing in Spain. Yet we feigned meaning to miss it after we
returned to Madrid from Toledo, saying that everybody went to the
Escorial and that it would be a proud distinction not to go. All the
time we knew we should go, and we were not surprised when we were chosen
by one of our few bright days for the excursion, though we were taken
inordinately early, and might well have been started a little later.
I
Nothing was out of the common on the way to the station, and our sense
of the ordinary was not relieved when we found ourselves in a car of the
American open-saloon pattern, well filled with other Americans bent upon
the same errand as ourselves; though I am bound to say that the backs of
the transverse seats rose well toward the roof of the car with a certain
originality.
When we cleared the city streets and houses, we began running out
into the country through suburbs vulgarly gay with small, bright brick
villas, so expressive of commuting that the eye required the vision of
young husbands and fathers going in at the gates with gardening tools
on their shoulders and under their arms. To be sure, the time of day
and the time of year were against this; it was now morning and autumn,
though there was a vernal brilliancy in the air; and the grass,
flattered by the recent rains, was green where we had last seen it
gray. Along a pretty stream, which, for all I know may have been the
Manzanares, it was so little, files of Lombardy poplars followed
away very agreeably golden in foliage; and scattered about were
deciduous-looking evergreens which we questioned for live-oaks. We were
going northward over the track which had brought us southward to Madrid
two weeks before, and by and by the pleasant levels broke into rough
hills and hollows, strewn with granite boulders which, as our train
mounted, changed into the savage rock masses of New Castile, and as we
drew near the village of Escorial gave the scene the look of that very
desolate country. But it could not be so gloomy in the kind sunlight
as it was when lashed by the savage storm which we had seen it cowering
under before; and at the station we lost all feeling of friendlessness
in the welcome of the thronging guides and hotel touters.
Our ideal was a carriage which we could keep throughout the day and use
for our return to the train in the afternoon; and this was so exactly
the ideal of a driver to whom we committed ourselves that we were
somewhat surprised to have his vehicle develop into a motor-omnibus, and
himself into a conductor.
When we arrived at the palace some miles off, up a winding way, he
underwent another change, and became our guide to the Escorial. In the
event he proved a very intelligent guide, as guides go, and I really
cannot now see how we could have got on without him. He adapted the
Spanish names of things to our English understanding by shortening
them; a _patio_ became a _pat’,_ and an old master an old mast’; and an
endearing quality was imparted to the grim memory of Philip II. by the
diminutive of Philly. We accepted this, but even to have Charles V.
brought nearer our hearts as Charley Fif, we could not bear to have our
guide exposed to the mockery of less considerate travelers. I instructed
him that the emperor’s name was Charles, and that only boys and very
familiar friends of that name were called Charley among us. He thanked
me, and at once spoke again of Charley Fif; which I afterward found was
the universally accepted style of the great emperor among the guides
of Spain. In vain I tried to persuade them out of it at Cordova, at
Seville, at Granada, and wherever else they had to speak of an emperor
whose memory really seems to pervade the whole land.