I Will As Little Pretend That My
Attitude Toward Spain Was Ever That Of The Impartial Observer After I
Crossed The Border Of That Enchanted Realm Where We All Have Our
Castles.
I have thought it best to be open with the reader here at the
beginning, and I would not, if I could, deny him the pleasure of
doubting my word or disabling my judgment at any point he likes.
In
return I shall only ask his patience when I strike too persistently the
chord of autobiography. That chord is part of the harmony between the
boy and the old man who made my Spanish journey together, and were
always accusing themselves, the first of dreaming and the last of
doddering: perhaps with equal justice. Is there really much difference
between the two?
II
It was fully a month before that first night in Granada that I arrived
in Spain after some sixty years' delay. During this period I had seen
almost every other interesting country in Europe. I had lived five or
six years in Italy; I had been several months in Germany; and a
fortnight in Holland; I had sojourned often in Paris; I had come and
gone a dozen times in England and lingered long each time; and yet I had
never once visited the land of my devotion. I had often wondered at
this, it was so wholly involuntary, and I had sometimes suffered from
the surprise of those who knew of my passion for Spain, and kept finding
out my dereliction, alleging the Sud-Express to Madrid as something that
left me without excuse. The very summer before last I got so far on the
way in London as to buy a Spanish phrase-book full of those inopportune
conversations with landlords, tailors, ticket-sellers, and casual
acquaintance or agreeable strangers. Yet I returned once more to
America with my desire, which was turning into a duty, unfulfilled; and
when once more I sailed for Europe in 1911 it was more with foreboding
of another failure than a prescience of fruition in my inveterate
longing. Even after that boldly decisive week of the professor in London
I had my doubts and my self-doubts. There were delays at London, delays
at Paris, delays at Tours; and when at last we crossed the Pyrenees and
I found myself in Spain, it was with an incredulity which followed me
throughout and lingered with me to the end. "Is this truly Spain, and am
I actually there?" the thing kept asking itself; and it asks itself
still, in terms that fit the accomplished fact.
II
SAN SEBASTIAN AND BEAUTIFUL BISCAY
Even at Irun, where we arrived in Spain from Bayonne, there began at
once to be temperamental differences which ought to have wrought against
my weird misgivings of my whereabouts. Only in Spain could a customs
inspector have felt of one tray in our trunks and then passed them all
with an air of such jaded aversion from an employ uncongenial to a
gentleman.
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