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.
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