His directions that we
spent the next half-hour in wandering fatuously round the whole region
before we stumbled, almost violently, upon it immediately back of the
Modern Museum.
Will, it be credited that it was then hardly worth seeing
for the things we meant to see? The Peruvian and Mexican antiquities
were so disappointing that we would hardly look at the Etruscan, Greek,
and Roman things which it was so much richer in. To be sure, we had seen
and overseen the like of these long before in Italy; but they were
admirably arranged in this museum, so that without the eager help of the
custodians (which two cents would buy at any turn) we could have found
pleasure in them, whereas the Aztec antiquities were mostly copies in
plaster and the Inca jewelry not striking.
Before finding the place we had had the help of two policemen and one
newsboy and a postman in losing ourselves in the Prado where we mostly
sought for it, and with difficulty kept ourselves from being thrust into
the gallery there. In Spain a man, or even a boy, does not like to say
he does not know where a place is; he is either too proud or too polite
to do it, and he will misdirect you without mercy. But the morning was
bright, and almost warm, and we should have looked forward to weeks of
sunny weather if our experience had not taught us that it would rain in
the afternoon, and if greater experience than ours had not instructed us
that there would be many days of thick fog now before the climate of
Madrid settled itself to the usual brightness of February. We had time
to note again in the Paseo Castellana, which is the fashionable drive,
that it consists of four rows of acacias and tamarisks and a stretch of
lawn, with seats beside it; the rest is bare grasslessness, with a
bridle-path on one side and a tram-line on the other. If it had been
late afternoon the Paseo would have been filled with the gay world, but
being the late forenoon we had to leave it well-nigh unpeopled and go
back to our hotel, where the excellent midday breakfast merited the best
appetite one could bring to it.
In fact, all the meals of our hotel were good, and of course they were
only too superabundant. They were pretty much what they were everywhere
in Spain, and they were better everywhere than they were in Granada
where we paid most for them. They were appetizing, and not of the
cooking which the popular superstition attributes to Spain, where the
hotel cooking is not rank with garlic or fiery with pepper, as the
untraveled believe. At luncheon in our Madrid hotel we had a liberal
choice of eggs in any form, the delicious _arroz a la Valencia,_ a kind
of risotto, with saffron to savor and color it; veal cutlets or
beefsteak, salad, cheese, grapes, pears, and peaches, and often melon;
the ever-admirable melon of Spain, which I had learned to like in
England. At dinner there were soup, fish, entree, roast beef, lamb, or
poultry, vegetables, salad, sweet, cheese, and fruit; and there was
pretty poor wine _ad libitum_ at both meals. For breakfast there was
good and true (or true enough) coffee with rich milk, which if we
sometimes doubted it to be goat's milk we were none the worse if none
the wiser for, as at dinner we were not either if we unwittingly ate kid
for lamb.
There were not many people in the hotel, but the dining-room was filled
by citizens who came in with the air of frequenters. They were not
people of fashion, as we readily perceived, but kindly-looking
mercantile folk, and ladies painted as white as newly calcimined house
walls; and all gravely polite. There was one gentleman as large round as
a hogshead, with a triple arrangement of fat at the back of his neck
which was fascinating. He always bowed when we met (necessarily with his
whole back) and he ate with an appetite proportioned to his girth. I
could wish still to know who and what he was, for he was a person very
much to my mind. So was the head waiter, dark, silent, clean-shaven, who
let me use my deplorable Spanish with him, till in the last days he came
out with some very fair English which he had been courteously concealing
from me. He looked own brother to the room-waiter in our corridor, whose
companionship I could desire always to have. One could not be so
confident of the sincerity of the little _camarera_ who slipped out of
the room with a soft, sidelong "_De nada"_ at one's thanks for the hot
water in the morning; but one could stake one's life on the goodness of
this _camarero._ He was not so tall as his leanness made him look; he
was of a national darkness of eyes and hair which as imparted to his
tertian clean-shavenness was a deep blue. He spoke, with a certain
hesitation, a beautiful Castilian, delicately lisping the sibilants and
strongly throating the gutturals; and what he said you could believe. He
never was out of the way when wanted; he darkled with your boots and
shoes in a little closet next your door, and came from it with the
morning coffee and rolls. In a stress of frequentation he appeared in
evening dress in the dining-room at night, and did honor to the place;
but otherwise he was to be seen only in our corridor, or in the cold,
dark chamber at the stair head where the _camareras_ sat sewing, kept in
check by his decorum. Without being explicitly advised of the fact, I am
sure he was the best of Catholics, and that he would have burnt me for a
heretic if necessary; but he would have done it from his conscience and
for my soul's good after I had recanted.
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