We Did Not Begin At Once Our Insensate Search For Another Hotel In
Madrid:
But the sky had cleared and we went out into the strange capital
so uncharacteristically characteristic, to find tea at a certain cafe we
had heard of.
It was in the Calle de Alcala (a name which so richly
stimulates the imagination), and it looked out across this handsome
street, to a club that I never knew the name of, where at a series of
open windows was a flare of young men in silk hats leaning out on their
elbows and letting no passing fact of the avenue escape them. It was
worth their study, and if I had been an idle young Spaniard, or an idle
old one, I would have asked nothing better than to spend my Sunday
afternoon poring from one of those windows on my well-known world of
Madrid as it babbled by. Even in my quality of alien, newly arrived and
ignorant of that world, I already felt its fascination.
Sunday in Spain is perhaps different from other days of the week to the
Spanish sense, but to the traveler it is too like them to be
distinguishable except in that guilty Sabbath consciousness which is
probably an effect from original sin in every Protestant soul. The
casual eye could not see but that in Madrid every one seemed as much or
as little at work as on any other day. My own casual eye noted that the
most picturesquely evident thing in the city was the country life which
seemed so to pervade it.
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