The tout led me into the first house we reached. There, was a narrow passage which passed by a room of a dingy whiteness; but the tout showed me on, up some stumbly stairs and through a spring door. We came into a dark room in which, by means of the light filtering through the slats of the closed shutters, could be seen the dim outlines of a bed and of a tin wash-hand-stand.
"Todo--todo--comida y toda," protested the tout. I had been waiting for this moment. In the conversation book which I had been studying was a phrase which had caught my fancy; it meant "no extras," but it was much more beautiful. The time had come.
"No, Señora, no," said the tout, spreading out his hands.
The matter having been thus settled, he took me downstairs again; and, in the dingy white diningroom, introduced me to a plump woman, the proprietress. I was ravenously hungry; the tables were laid. I asked:
I was dismayed. It was now eleven o'clock--we had eaten little since the night before.
"But," I stammered, "I am hungry. Tengo hambre." My memory shuffled with conversation-book sentences and faint recollections of Majorca, but could find nothing about the minutiæ of food.
"Tengo hambre," I repeated desperately. Suddenly inspiration came to me. I made motions of beating up an omelet and clucked like a hen that has laid an egg.
For a moment there was a silence, a positive kind of silence, which is much more still than mere absence of noise. Then a roar of laughter went up. The fat hostess shook like a jelly, the tout guffawed behind a restraining hand--he had not yet received his tip--while an old woman who had been sitting in one of the darker corners, went off:
"Ck! Ck! Ck! He! He! He! Ck! Ck! Ck! He! He! He!"
At this moment Jan arrived, having deposited the bigger luggage and having been informed that the train to Avila, our first stopping-place, went out at 8 a.m. I led him along the dark passage and upstairs. He flung wide the shutters. The window looked into a deep, triangular well at the bottom of which was a floor of stamped earth, a washtub and a hen-coop. Windows of all sizes pierced the walls at irregular intervals and across the well were stretched ropes, from some of which flapped pieces of damp linen or underclothes. In the light of the open window the room was dingy. We wondered if there were bugs in it, for we had been cautioned against these insects.