IHIS CORNER APART
In spirit, as in distance, it is a far cry from the childlike gaiety and extravagance of Vienna to the gloom and haughty poverty of Madrid. Gloomy in its psychic rather than its physical aspects is this city of the plain, for while the sun scorches in summer and the wind chills in winter, thanks to the quite modern architecture of New Madrid, there is ample light and space all the year round.
Any Spanish history will tell you that Charles V chose this place for his capital because the climate was good for his gout. One author maintains that it was for the far subtler reason that Madrid was neutral ground between the jealous cities of Toledo, Valladolid and Seville. But everyone, past and present, agrees that the Spanish capital is the least Spanish of any town in the kingdom. It shares but one distinctive trait with the rest of Spain—and that the dominant trait of the nation: pride, illimitable and unconditioned, in the glory of the past; oblivion to the ruin of the present.
Like a great artist whose star has set, Spain sits aloof from the modern powers she despises; wrapped in her enshrouding cloak of self-sufficiency, she dreams or prattles garrulously of the days when sheruled without peer—not heeding, not even knowing, that the stage today is changed beyond her recognition.
The attitude is, however, far more interesting than the bustle and mere business efficiency of the typical modern capital. After the vastness and confusion of Waterloo and St. Lazare, one arrives in Madrid at a little station suggestive of a sleepy provincial town. Porters are few and far between, and one generally carries one’s own bags to the primitive horse cabs waiting outside. Taxis are almost unheard of, and the few that are seen demand prices as fabulous as those of New York. EveryMadrileñowho can possibly afford it has a carriage, but the rank and file use the funny little trams—which I must say, however, are excellently conducted and most convenient.
Both the trams and all streets and avenues are plainly marked with large clear signs, and the pleasant compactness of the city makes it easy to find one’s way about. The centre of life and activity is the Puerto del Sol—Gate of the Sun—an oval plaza which Spaniards fondly describe as “the busiest square in the world.” There is no doubt at all that it is the noisiest; with its clanging trams, rattling carriages, shouting street vendors, and ambulant musicians.
These latter, with the beggars, form to my mind the greatest plague of Madrid; their number is legion, their instruments strangely and horribly devised, and they have the immoral generosity to play on, just the same, whether you give them money or not.Though, as a matter of fact, when you walk in the Puerta del Sol, they are forever under your feet, shaking their tin cups forcentimosand whining for attention.
I infinitely prefer the gentle-voiced old men—of whom there is also an army—who offer soft balls of puppies for sale; and, when they are refused, tenderly return the cherished scrap to their warm pockets. The swarm of impish newsboys are hard to snub, too: Murillo has ingratiated them with one forever—their rags and their angelic brown eyes in rogues’ faces.
But I find no difficulty at all in refusing the beggars. These are of every age, costume and infirmity; and enjoy full privilege of attacking citizen or stranger, without intervention of any kind by the police. A Spanish lady naïvely explained to me that they had indeed tried to deal with the beggars; that the government had once deported them one and all to the places where they were born—forof coursenone of them came originally from Madrid! But, would I believe it, within a week they were all back again? Perhaps I, as a foreigner, could not understand how the poor creatures simply loved Madrid too passionately to remain away.
I assured the señora gravely I could understand. In fact, it seems to me entirely normal to be passionately attached to a place that yields one a tidy income for nothing. No, rather for the extensive development and use of one’s persuasive powers. Imagination, too, and diplomacy must be employed; andsometimes the nice art of “coming down.” The monologue runs like this:
“Good afternoon, gentleman. The gentleman is surely the most handsome, the most kind-hearted, the best-dressed, and most polite of all the world. If the gentleman could part with a peseta—nine-pence—to a brother in deepest woe, God would reward him. God would give him still more elegant health and more ravishing children. If he has no children, God would certainly send him some—for only half a peseta, oh, gracious gentleman. To a brother whose afflictions could not be recited from now till the end of the world, so multiple, so heartrending are they. I am an old man of seventy, oh, most beautiful gentleman—old as the gentleman’s illustrious father, may Mary and the angels grant him long life! Only twenty centimos, my gentleman—God will give you a million. Ten centimos—five!...Caramba!a curse on your hideous face and loping gait. There is no uglier toad this side of hell!”
One thing beggarscanchoose with proficiency: their language. In Madrid they would be less disgusting were it not for their loathsome diseases and deformities. The government is far too poor to isolate them in asylums, so they continue to possess the streets and the already overcrowded Gate of the Sun.
From this plaza the principal thoroughfares of the city branch off in a sort of wheel, and mules, goats and donkeys laden with every imaginable sort of burden pass to and fro at all hours of day and night.Shops there are, of course, of various kinds; and cafés crowded round the square; but the waiters carry the trays on their heads, and the whole atmosphere is that of a mediæval interior town rather than a modern cosmopolitan city.
To be sure, in Alcalà, the principal street off the Puerta del Sol, there are clubs and up-to-date restaurants; but only men are supposed to go to the restaurants, and in the clubs they look ill at ease and incongruous. The life of the Spaniard is inalienably the life in the streets, where you will find him at all hours, strolling along in his clothes of fantastic cut and colour or sitting at a café, drinkinghorchatas—the favourite beverage, made from a little nut. His constant expression is a steady stare; varying from the dreamily absent-minded to the crudely vulgar and licentious.
The widely diversified ancestry of the Spanish people is keenly interesting to follow out in the features of the men and women of today; among no race is there greater variety of type, though it is four hundred years since the Moors and Jews were driven out, and new blood has been practically excluded from Spain. Yet one sees the Moorish and Jewish casts as distinct today as ever they were; to say nothing of the aquiline Roman or the ruddy Gothic types from the far more ancient period.
In names, too, history is eloquent: we find Edwigis, Gertrudis, and Clotilde of the Gothic days; Zenaida and Agueda of the Moorish; Raquel, Ester of the Jewish. I think that in no language is theresuch variety or beauty in women’s names. Take, for example, Consuelo, Amparo (Succour), Luz—pronounced Luth and meaning Light—or Felicitas, Rosario, Pílar, Soledad, and a wealth of others as liquid and as significant.
It is hard to attach them to the rather mediocre women one sees in the streets on their way to mass: dressed in cheap tailored frocks, a flimsy width of black net over their heads. The mantilla is no longer current in Madrid, except forfiestasand as the caprice of the wealthy; but this shoddy offspring of the mantilla—the inferior black veil—is everywhere seen on all classes of women. TheMadrileñawho wears a hat announces herself rich beyond recounting, and is charged accordingly in the shops. Needless to say, there is no such thing as a fixed price in any but the places of foreign origin.
I have often wondered whether Spanish women are stupid because they are kept in such seclusion or whether they are secluded because they are stupid. It is hard to separate the cause from the effect. But certainly the Spanish beauty of song and story is rarer than rubies today; while the animation that gives charm even to an ugly French or American woman is utterly lacking in theEspañola’sheavy, rather sensual features. I am inclined to think, from the fact that it is saliently a man’s country, she is as he has made her, or allowed her to become. And when you remember that her highest enjoyment is to drive through the rough-paved streets, hour after hour, that she may see and be seen; when you considerthat the rest of her day is spent in a cheerless house without a book or a magazine, or any occupation but menial household drudgery, you pity rather than condemn the profound ignorance of the average Spanish woman.
Married at sixteen, the mother of four or five children by the time she is twenty-five, she grows old before her time even as a Latin woman. While by men she is disregarded and treated with a rudeness and lack of respect revolting to the Anglo-Saxon. Her husband precedes her into and out of the room, leaves her the less comfortable seat, blows smoke in her face, and expectorates in her presence; all as a matter of course, which she accepts in the same spirit. Herraison d’êtreis as a female; nothing more. What wonder that the brain she has is expended in gossip and intrigue and that her husband openly admits he cannot trust her out of his sight?
Like the Eastern women she resembles, she is superstitiously devout; as, indeed, the men are, too, when they remember to be. All the morning, weekdays as well as Sunday, the churches are full; one mass succeeds another. It is a favourite habit of the younger men to wait outside the fashionable churches until the girls and their duenas come out, and then to remark quite audibly on the charms of the former. The compliments are of the most bare-faced variety, but are affably received; even sometimes returned by a discreet retortsotto voce. The blades call the custom “throwing flowers”; and the bolder of the maidensare apt to fling back over their shoulder, “thanks for the flower!”
One can always see this little comedy outside the well-known church of San Isidro—patron saint of Madrid—which, with the more important clubs and public buildings, is in the Street of the Alcalà. The Alcalà connects the Puerta del Sol with the famous promenades of the Prado and the Castellana, which are joined together by an imposing plaza with a fountain, and extend as far as the park of the Retiro.
Spaniards are firmly convinced that the Castellana is finer than the Champs Elysées; but it is, in reality, a rather stupid avenue—broad, and with plenty of trees in pots of water, yet quite flat, and lacking the quaintguignolsand smart restaurants that give color to the French promenade. Galician nursemaids, with their enormous earrings, congregate round the ice-cream booths, while their overdressed charges play “bullfight” or “circus” in the allées nearby.
But the Castellana is an empty stretch of sand, for the most part, until half-past six in the evening, when it becomes for an hour or two the liveliest quarter of the city. The mansions on either side of the street open their gates, carriages roll forth,señorasin costumes of French cut but startling hue are bowled into the central driveway,señorsin equally impressive garments appear on horseback, and the “paseo”—the event of the day—has begun.
Strangers who have not been asked to dine with their Spanish friends because the latter cannot afforda cook will be repeatedly taken to drive in a luxurious equipage with two men on the box and a pair of high-stepping bays. For a Spanish family will scrimp and save, and sometimes actually half starve, in order to maintain its place in the daily procession on the Castellana. This is true of all classes, from the impoverished aristocracy to the struggling bourgeoisie; and is so much a racial characteristic that the same holds in Manila, Havana, and many of the South American cities. What his house is to the Englishman, his trip to Europe to the American, his carriage is to the Spaniard. With this hallmark of social solvency he can hold up his head with the proudest; without it he is an outcast.
The Madrileños tell among themselves of certain ladies who afford the essential victoria by dressing fashionably from the waist up only. A carriage rug covers the other and well-worn part of their apparel. This is consistent with stories of economy carried into the smallest item of the household expenses—such as cooking without salt or pepper, and foregoing a tablecloth—in order that the family name may appear among the box-holders at the opera. Spanish people look upon these sacrifices, when they know them, as altogether admirable; from peasant to grandee, they are forever aiding and abetting each other at that most pitiful of all games: keeping up appearances. But, however petty the apparent motive, there is a certain tragic courage behind it; the desperate, final courage of thegrand artiste, refusing to admit thathis day is dead. And under all his burdens, all his bitter poverty, silent, uncomplaining.
Seen in this light, that stately queue of carriages on the Castellana takes on something more than its mere superficial significance—which is to show oneself, and further to show one’s daughters. Officers and civilians walk up and down, on either side of the driveway, or canter along near the carriages, with one object: to stare at the young girls. Far from being snubbed, their interest is welcomed with complaisance, and many and many a marriage is arranged from one of these encounters on the Castellana.
The young man notices the same girl for two or three days, then asks to be presented to her; the heads of the two families confer, finances are frankly discussed, and, if everything is found satisfactory, the courtship is allowed to proceed. Parents are generally easy to satisfy, too, being in frantic haste to marry off their daughters. The old maid and the bachelor girl are unknown quantities in Spain, and an officer with a salary of five pounds a month is eagerly snapped up as an excellent catch.
This gives some idea of the absolute pittance whole families are used to live on, and to consider ample. The bare necessities of life are gratefully counted by Spaniards as luxuries; while luxuries, in the modern sense of the word, are practically unheard of. Private motor cars, for example, are so rare as to be noticed when they pass through the streets; while, on the other hand, a sleek pair of mules is considered almost as emphatic a sign of prosperity as apair of horses. It is an everyday sight to see the gold cockades of royalty, or the silver of nobility, on the box behind two mules. And a Spaniard realizes nothing curious about this. If it is a habit of his countrymen, it is right, and proper, and elegant, and to be emulated by all who can afford it.
If you tell him, moreover, of the conveniences of other countries—not in comparison with his own, but quite casually—he looks at you with an indulgent smile, and believes not a word of it. He himself is far too poor to travel, so that naturally he is skeptical of what he calls “traveller’s tales.” I once showed a Marqués whom I was entertaining in Madrid a picture of the Metropolitan Tower in New York. He laughed, like an amused child. “Those Americans! They are always boasting,” he said, “but one must confess they are clever to construct a photograph like that.” Nor was I able to convince him during the remainder of the evening that such a building and many others as tall actually did exist.
The old actor sits with his eyes glued to his own pictures, mesmerizing himself into the belief that they are now as ever they were: representative of the greatest star of all the stage. He cares not to study the methods of the new generation, for he loftily ignores its existence. Tradition is the poison that infests his bones, and is surely eating them away.
He has a son who would save him if the dotard would permit: a tall young man, with a splendid carriage and an ugly, magnetic face—alert to every detail of modern régime. But the young man is aking, and kings, as everyone knows, have the least power of anybody. Alfonso XIII, with all his indefatigable energy, can leaven but a very small lump of the blind self-sufficiency of Spain. He plays a hopeless part bravely and is harder-working than most of his peasants.
His palace stands at the edge of old Madrid, on the high land above the river, where the old Moorish Alcazar once stood: a magnificent situation. The façade fronts and dominates the city; the rear looks out on the river Mazanares and beyond, on the royal park of the Casa del Campo. Here one can often see the King shooting pigeons in the afternoon or taking tea with the Queen and the Queen Mother. The people are not permitted in this park, but foreigners may apply for a card of admission and go there at any time, provided their coachman is in livery.
FranzenTHE QUEEN OF SPAIN AND THE PRINCE OF THE ASTURIAS
FranzenTHE QUEEN OF SPAIN AND THE PRINCE OF THE ASTURIAS
Franzen
THE QUEEN OF SPAIN AND THE PRINCE OF THE ASTURIAS
One Sunday I saw the royal children, with their nurses, building a bonfire in a corner of the park. They were shouting and running about most lustily, and it was a relief to see royalty—though at the age of three and four—having a good time. The little Prince of the Asturias was in uniform, Prince Jaimé in sailor’s togs, and the two small Infantas in white frocks with blue sashes. They all looked simply and comfortably dressed, and a credit to the good sense of their father and mother. The nurses, who are Englishwomen—pink-cheeked and cheerful—wore plain blue cotton frocks and shady straw hats, like anyone else’s nurses. It was a satisfying picture, after theelaborateness and false show that surround the average Spanish child.
Of all the royal children, Jaimé is the beloved of the people. He has a singularly sweet and at the same time animated face, and, the Spaniards proudly declare, is the true Spanish type. Doubtless, too, his sad infirmity—he was born a deaf mute—and his patience and cleverness in coping with it have endeared this little prince to everybody.
The reigning Spanish family are the last of the powerful Bourbons, and their court is conducted with all the Bourbon etiquette of Louis XIV. It is a less brilliant court than the Austrian, being very much poorer, but the shining white grandeur of the palace itself makes up for elegance foregone by the courtiers. For once, Spain’s overweening pride is justified: she boasts the loveliest royal residence of any nation.
An interesting time to visit it is at Guard Mount in the morning. Then the beautiful inner court is filled with Lancers in plumed helmets and brilliant blue uniforms, riding splendidly matched roans. Two companies of infantry, in their darker blue and red, line the hollow square; and in the centre are the officers, magnificently mounted and aglitter with gold braid and orders. They advance into the court to the slow and stately measure of the Royal March, and sometimes the King appears on the balcony above—to the delight of the people, who are allowed to circulate freely in the passages of the pillaredpatio.
Peasants are there by the score, in their shabbyearth-brown corduroys, and soft-eyed girls with stout duenas, swaying fans between the threadbare fingers of their cheap cotton gloves. Students with faded capes swung from their shoulders; swarms of children and shuffling old men in worn sombreros; priests, bullfighters, beggars, and vendors of everything from sweetmeats to bootlaces, wander in and out the arcades while the band plays.
In spite of the modern uniforms of the soldiers, it is a scene out of another age: a sleepy, sunny age, when all the simple people demanded was a heel of bread and the occasional spectacle of the pomp of their masters. Yet it is the Spain of today; in the foreground its brave show of traditional splendour; peering out from behind, its penury and rags.
The old actor sees none of this. In his forgotten corner he has wound himself within his gorgeous tattered cloak of long ago; and crouches into it, eyes closed upon a vision in which he never ceases to play the part of Cæsar.