Castilian Days | Page 6

to all the
world. You shall see there, any pleasant day before the Carnival, the
aristocracy of the kingdom, the fast young hopes of the nobility, the
diplomatic body resident, and the flexible figures and graceful bearing
of the high-born ladies of Castile. Here they take the air as free from
snobbish competition as the good society of Olympus, while a hundred
paces farther south, just beyond the Mint, the world at large takes its
plebeian constitutional. How long, with a democratic system of
government, this purely conventional respect will be paid to blue-ness
of blood cannot be conjectured. Its existence a year after the Revolution
was to me one of the most singular of phenomena.
After Easter Monday the Castellana is left to its own devices for the
summer. With the warm long days of May and June, the evening walk
in the Salon begins. Europe affords no scene more original and
characteristic. The whole city meets in this starlit drawing-room. It is a
vast evening party al fresco, stretching from the Alcala to the Course of

San Geronimo. In the wide street beside it every one in town who owns
a carriage may be seen moving lazily up and down, and apparently
envying the gossiping strollers on foot. On three nights in the week
there is music in the Retiro Garden,--not as in our feverish way
beginning so early that you must sacrifice your dinner to get there, and
then turning you out disconsolate in that seductive hour which John
Phoenix used to call the "shank of the evening," but opening sensibly at
half past nine and going leisurely forward until after midnight. The
music is very good. Sometimes Arban comes down from Paris to
recover from his winter fatigues and bewitch the Spains with his wizard
_baton._
In all this vast crowd nobody is in a hurry. They have all night before
them. They stayed quietly at home in the stress of the noontide when
the sunbeams were falling in the glowing streets like javelins,--they
utilized some of the waste hours of the broiling afternoon in sleep, and
are fresh as daisies now. The women are not haunted by the thought of
lords and babies growling and wailing at home. Their lords are beside
them, the babies are sprawling in the clean gravel by their chairs. Late
in the small hours I have seen these family parties in the promenade,
the husband tranquilly smoking his hundredth cigarette, his placens
uxor dozing in her chair, one baby asleep on the ground, and another
slumbering in her lap.
This Madrid climate is a gallant one, and kindlier to the women than
the men. The ladies are built on the old-fashioned generous plan. Like a
Southern table in the old times, the only fault is too abundant plenty.
They move along with a superb dignity of carriage that Banting would
like to banish from the world, their round white shoulders shining in
the starlight, their fine heads elegantly draped in the coquettish and
always graceful mantilla. But you would look in vain among the men
of Madrid for such fulness and liberality of structure. They are thin,
eager, sinewy in ap' pearance,--though it is the spareness of the Turk,
not of the American. It comes from tobacco and the Guadarrama winds.
This still, fine, subtle air that blows from the craggy peaks over the
treeless plateau seems to take all superfluous moisture out of the men
of Madrid. But it is, like Benedick's wit, "a most manly air, it will not
hurt a woman." This tropic summer-time brings the halcyon days of the
vagabonds of Madrid. They are a temperate, reasonable people, after all,

when they are let alone. They do not require the savage stimulants of
our colder-blooded race. The fresh air is a feast. As Walt Whitman says,
they loaf and invite their souls. They provide for the banquet only the
most spiritual provender. Their dissipation is confined principally to
starlight and zephyrs; the coarser and wealthier spirits indulge in ice,
agraz, and meringues dissolved in water. The climax of their luxury is a
cool bed. Walking about the city at midnight, I have seen the fountains
all surrounded by luxurious vagabonds asleep or in revery, dozens of
them stretched along the rim of the basins, in the spray of the splashing
water, where the least start would plunge them in. But the dreams of
these Latin beggars are too peaceful to trouble their slumber. They lie
motionless, amid the roar of wheels and the tramp of a thousand feet,
their bed the sculptured marble, their covering the deep, amethystine
vault, warm and cherishing with its breath of summer winds, bright
with its trooping stars. The Providence of the worthless watches and
guards them!
The chief commerce of the streets