On the alert as her mother would be now, I should find it more difficult than ever to communicate with the girl. Yet I could not bear to leave Manzanares in fear of a misunderstanding.
Nothing more could be done at the moment, however; and I hurried Ropes off that we might finish our errand and get back by the time that Monica was down.
It appeared that the man who had volunteered information about moto-naphtha was waiting to act as guide. He was still at the chemist’s, and from there led us to the Casa Consistorial. At the Casa Consistorial were two policemen in the hall, warming themselves over a hole in the ground, where glowed charcoal embers. But the Mayor had not arrived. Without him nothing could be arranged. Besides, even if he were present and willing to consent, the key of the cemetery was with the _cura_, who might be anywhere.
Off we dashed to the _cura’s_ house, and just in time. Five minutes later, and we might have had to wait hours for him. But there he was, a delightful, white-haired old man, who would be charmed to open the cemetery for our worships, since it was not to bury us; but he could make no move in that direction without the honourable concurrence of the Mayor.
Back, then, we bustled to the Casa Consistorial, with the sensation of shuttlecocks, played between battledores at cross purposes.
But at last the second battledore was ready to send us in the right direction. The Mayor, a young man, who looked like a lawyer in tall hat and frock-coat, was as polite as only a Spaniard can be. He put himself, and his house, and Manzanares at our service. It was something like being given the freedom of London; and what was more to the point than anything else, he offered us as much moto-naphtha as the town possessed, at any price we pleased to pay.
The question was, how much did the town possess; a single quart, or a hundred gallons? The Mayor himself was not sure, so we rattled off in an ancient “simón” to the cemetery to find out; and luckily were able to carry away all we were likely to need for the next two days, while leaving some for the locusts. But between the Casa Consistorial, the house of the _cura_, the distant cemetery, and the drive back to our stable-garage, it had taken us nearly three hours to achieve our end. Then there was a little lingering with the car, to make sure that all was well and no more tricks had been played; and the walk back to the _fonda_ exhausted the last of my patience. I had not expected to be gone more than an hour, and I had been gone three. Meanwhile, I said to myself, almost anything might have happened. My idea had been to get back by the time that Monica was dressed, and now, for all I could tell, she might have gone.
Dick laughed at this suggestion, for, said he, Carmona’s chauffeur was not a worker of miracles except, perhaps, on other men’s cars; and he could not have got his master’s in order and ready to start. His arguments were reasonable; nevertheless, like many other plausible deductions, they were wrong; for the first news we heard at the hotel was that the grey automobile had left nearly an hour before. The chauffeur, it seemed, had been up all night working, and had had assistance in the early morning at a machine-shop. The injuries had been patched up, and the car was expected to get on either to Andujar, or Linares if a certain bridge had been finished.
After all, this was not as bad as if we had made no promise to the Duchess. We were bound not to lie in wait for, or closely follow, her son’s car; and had it not been for the “luck of the Dream-Book,” Carmona and his party would have been far away last night when we arrived at Manzanares. Had I not been tortured by doubts about the fate of my letter, I might have been philosopher enough to say: “Patience, until Seville!”
As it was, patience was the last virtue I could cultivate; and for what remained of that day, I was unable to find the smallest pleasure in motoring.
Again we were on the highroad between Madrid and Seville; yet the waving ruts and ridges of hardened mud were sprinkled with a green glaze of grass, as if in treacherous attempt at concealment. Dust curled behind us like smoke, creeping under the tarpaulin that covered our luggage on the roof, and into our suit-cases, powdering our clothing like fine white sugar.
Despite the good springs and deep cushions of the car, Pilar’s light body danced up and down, as Dick said, like a bit of American popcorn over a hot fire; and our two guests, who had thought themselves motor enthusiasts, did not respond ardently to Dick’s forced praises of the sport.
How glorious, said he (every other word emphasized with a bump), how glorious not to be bound down to the fixed and inconvenient hours of trains. To stop where and when you like; to start on again when you choose; never to have your view of the choicest bit of scenery blotted out in a tunnel; to be grimed by no railway smoke; always to feel your face fanned by a fresh breeze, tingling with ozone; to read—if you had the seeing eye—the whole life of the country in writing on the road; the tracks of heavy carts; the delicate prints of donkey’s feet, trotting to market laden with wine or fruit; the tracing of diligence wheels, or old-fashioned carriages on their way to a bull-fight; the footmarks of peasants economically carrying their shoes over their shoulders; the clover-like imprint of sheeps’ little hoofs, and goats’; the pads of shepherd dogs. To flash through kinematographic glimpses of vineland and oliveland, and graceful blue mountain shapes; to see strange villages of whose existence you would never know when plodding along by train; to fly from one living reminder of Don Quixote to another, as we were doing to-day (had we not seen the inn where he was knighted?)—Bang! Never before can I remember hailing with delight the pistol-like report which can mean but one thing; the bursting of a tyre. But I was enchanted that Dick’s eloquence should be interrupted.
We had jolted through wine-making Valdepeñas, where the red juice of the grape seems to spout from a grey valley of stones; we had passed, in the quaint market-place, the posada which Don Quixote knew; we had bounced through Santa Cruz de Mudela, with its fine old fifteenth century church, and had seen its famous and gaily coloured garters exposed for sale in the shops; and now we were far from towns or villages, out in the country.
Luckily, everybody was ready for lunch, and Pilar and the Cherub had had the forethought to order things which would not have occurred to Dick or me. Not far away, on the crest of a hill-billow, stood a road-mender’s house, with an outside, adobe oven like a huge beehive. We crawled to it, travelling on the collapsed tyre, and were served by a delightful brown family; served as if we had been the King and his suite who had lunched (so said the brown family) on that spot a few weeks ago. Out came the chairs which the King and his friends had sat in, plates and glasses from which the King and his friends had drunk; and the simple people derived a childlike pleasure from dwelling on the episode.
As before, the news of our presence seemed to flash through the air and bring, in the same mysterious way, an audience out of empty space. Pilar said that the people who came were in reality wild birds, seen by our sophisticated eyes in the form of human beings; and as if they had been wild birds, we coaxed them, till they trusted us and fed with us, drinking from our wineskin the blood of the Spanish grape, almost innocent of alcohol. The soft Spanish language, as it fell from their lips, was rich as the taste of that Spanish wine on the tongue, and stirred in my heart a pride of kinsmanship.
While we others lunched, Ropes jacked up the Gloria and changed the inner tube, pausing now and then to munch a sandwich or swallow a draught of wine with an unruffled air characteristic of him. When the road-mender mentioned that four _bandidos_ had been captured in the morning by the civil guard, on the road along which we had passed, his expression did not change by the twitching of a muscle. Indeed, he looked equal to disposing of half a dozen brigands without the aid of a single guardia civile.
After forty minutes by the wayside, we set off to penetrate farther into that melancholy country which Cervantes loved, and almost at once were in the Venta de Cordeñas, that wide and stony waste where Don Quixote rode to do his penance. The gayest spirits must have been dashed by the gloom of the knight’s self-imposed prison, and mine were not improved. I had a disquieting impression that Monica’s voice, calling an appeal, came echoing from the mountain walls.
Of course, there was nothing in it, except superstitious nonsense of which I ought to be ashamed; yet I could not shut my ears to her voice, which seemed to cry the words her fingers once had written: “Don’t desert me! Don’t leave me alone!”
Always the echo followed, as the car mounted higher on the slopes of the Sierra Morena, and such glories of Spain opened out before our eyes as we had not seen yet, even in the splendid Gorge of Pancorbo.