We rolled along, manufacturing our halo as we went, until, coming out of the press of carriages into cobbled and ill-lit streets, our glory fell away from us and we rocked on, reflecting on this apt illustration of the old French proverb concerning beauty and suffering. Gradually we decided that we could have dispensed with this weird introduction to Madrid in order to have spared our throats.
Our friend Jesus Perez had given us an address appropriately enough in the Place of the Angel. But there were three _pensions_ in the same building and he had not discriminated. So I, leaving Jan to look after the bus, went to explore, and knocking at random was brought face to face with an old lady who had not a trace of the angelic in her constitution. While she was grumpily and wilfully misunderstanding me, insisting that the Señor for whom I was looking did not live there, a crowd of well-fed persons sifted from the dining-room and stood in a circle staring at me with cold-eyed curiosity. As they stared they all picked their teeth. At last I forced understanding on her and she told me in a surly voice that her _pension_ was full. The other two _pensions_ were full also. It was explained to me that Madrid was suffering from congestion, that never had such a season been experienced.
So I retreated from the stairs and we held a council of distress in the street. The driver of the bus, who did not indeed look like a very competent judge, said that he knew of a good _pension_. By a series of manoeuvres, about as complicated as the turning of a large ship in a small river, he got his bus reversed and we set off again the way we had come. But once more we met a refusal, backed by wide-eyed staring and public tooth-picking.
We had the address of an hotel, as a last resource indeed, for it was somewhat beyond our means, costing seventeen pesetas a day _en pension_. So in despair we made our way to it, wondering whether the congestion had spread from the eight peseta boarding-houses to the seventeen-peseta hotels, and whether our first night in Madrid was to be spent in the bus. We came back into the garishly lit main streets of Madrid and at last the bus halted. There was no hotel front, and we plunged between two shops along a passage from which photographs of the beauties of Madrid showed exquisite sets of teeth from the showcases of a society photographer. A narrow, twisting staircase--the lift was out of order--spiralled us up to a sumptuous hotel decorated with mirrors and white paint arranged with a Permanic taste. Rooms were to be had, and so we resigned ourselves to luxury for a few days.