He
Followed Us Into The Wettest Madrid Weather With The Sunny Rays Of His
Temperament, And Welcomed Our Returning Cab
With an effulgence that
performed the effect of an umbrella in the longish walk from the
curbstone to the hotel
Door, past the grape arbor whose fruit ripened
for us only in a single bunch, though he had so confidently prophesied
our daily pleasure in it. He seemed at first to be the landlord, and
without reference to higher authority he gave us beautiful rooms
overlooking the bacchanal vine which would have been filled with
sunshine if the weather had permitted. When he lapsed into the
concierge, he got us, for five pesetas, so deep and wide a wood-box,
covered with crimson cloth, that he was borne out by the fact in
declaring that the wood in it would last us as long as we stayed; it was
oak wood, hard as iron, and with the bellows that accompanied it we blew
the last billet of it into a solid coal by which we drank our last
coffee in that hotel. His spirit, his genial hopefulness, reconciled us
to the infirmities of the house during the period of transition
beginning for it and covering our stay. It was to be rebuilt on a scale
out-Ritzing the Ritz; but in the mean while it was not quite the Ritz.
There was a time when the elevator-shaft seemed to have tapped the awful
sources of the smell in the house of Cervantes at Valladolid, but I do
not remember what blameless origin the concierge assigned to the odor,
or whether it had anything to do with the horses and the hens which a
chance-opened back door showed us stabled in the rear of the hotel's
grandiose entrance.
Our tourist clientele, thanks I think to the allure of our concierge for
all comers, was most respectable, though there was no public place for
people to sit but a small reading-room colder than the baths of Apollo.
But when he entered the place it was as if a fire were kindled in the
minute stove never otherwise heated, and the old English and French
newspapers freshened themselves up to the actual date as nearly as they
could. We were mostly, perhaps, Spanish families come from our several
provinces for a bit of the season which all Spanish families of civil
condition desire more or less of: lean, dark fathers, slender,
white-stuccoed daughters, and fat, white-stuccoed mothers; very
still-faced, and grave-mannered. We were also a few English, and from
time to time a few Americans, but I believe we were not, however worthy,
very great-world. The concierge who had so skilfully got us together
was instant in our errands and commissions, and when it came to two of
us being shut up with colds brought from Burgos it vas he who
supplemented the promptness of the apothecaries in sending our medicines
and coming himself at times to ask after our welfare.
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