Notoriously, However, It Has
Not A Good Climate And We Had Not Come At The Right Season To Get The
Best Of The Bad.
The bad season itself was perverse, for the rains do
not usually begin in their bitterness at Madrid before November, and now
they began early in October.
The day would open fair, with only a few
little white clouds in the large blue, and if we could trust other's
experience we knew it would rain before the day closed; only a morning
absolutely clear could warrant the hope of a day fair till sunset.
Shortly after noon the little white clouds would drift together and be
joined by others till they hid the large blue, and then the drops would
begin to fall. By that time the air would have turned raw and chill, and
the rain would be of a cold which it kept through the night.
This habit of raining every afternoon was what kept us from seeing rank,
riches, and beauty in the Paseo de la Castellana, where they drive only
on fine afternoons; they now remained at home even more persistently
than we did, for with that love of the fashionable world for which I am
always blaming myself I sometimes took a cab and fared desperately forth
in pursuit of them. Only once did I seem to catch a glimpse of them, and
that once I saw a closed carriage weltering along the drive between the
trees and the trams that border it, with the coachman and footman snugly
sheltered under umbrellas on the box. This was something, though not a
great deal; I could not make out the people inside the carriage; yet it
helped to certify to me the fact that the great world does drive in the
Paseo de la Castellana and does not drive in the Paseo del Prado; that
is quite abandoned, even on the wettest days, to the very poor and
perhaps unfashionable people.
V
It may have been our comparative defeat with fashion in its most
distinctive moments of pleasuring (for one thing I wished to see how the
dreariness of Madrid gaiety in the Paseo de la Castellana would compare
with that of Roman gaiety on the Pincian) which made us the more
determined to see a bull-fight in the Spanish capital. We had vowed
ourselves in coming to Spain to set the Spaniards an example of
civilization by inflexibly refusing to see a bull-fight under any
circumstances or for any consideration; but it seemed to us that it was
a sort of public duty to go and see the crowd, what it was like, in the
time and place where the Spanish crowd is most like itself. We would go
and remain in our places till everybody else was placed, and then, when
the picadors and banderilleros and matadors were all ranged in the
arena, and the gate was lifted, and the bull came rushing madly in, we
would rise before he had time to gore anybody, and go inexorably away.
This union of self-indulgence and self-denial seemed almost an act of
piety when we learned that the bull-fight was to be on Sunday, and we
prepared ourselves with tickets quite early in the week.
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