We had expected so much from Spain. We had hoped at the first moment to open out our arms to her sun, to satiate our colour sense with the blueness of her skies--we were received instead with this grey, gloomy weather. How can one describe the revulsion? It would be an exaggeration to say that it was as though we had touched a corpse where we had expected to find a living man, but the revulsion was of this nature though perhaps less poignant.
I left Jan to finish with the larger luggage and, securing the aid of a porter, set out to look for an hotel. At the exit of the station I was accosted by a sallow man with a large, peaked jockey cap pulled down over a thin face.
He said: "Hey, Señora! Hotel? Spik Engleesh. Yes."
"We don't want a dear place," I answered in English. "We want a cheap one, understand?"
"Hotel. Spik Engleesh. Yes," replied the tout.
"Puede usted recomendarme una fonda barata?" said I, out of the conversation book, though the "_barata_"[1] at the end was my own.
But the tout turned sulky and would not answer--I suppose he thought his fee would diminish if he were enticed into Spanish. The porter stood on one side; he was a small, inadequate man and he sniffed continually. Whether he had caught cold from the rain, or whether he was expressing his private opinion of travellers, I did not learn. Jan was arranging about our trunk and a hold-all; I had in my charge two thermos flasks, a camera, two rucksacks--memories of days in the German Tyrol before the war--and a suit-case which had been with us in Serbia and which still bore the faint traces of a painted red cross, but the cat had for the last two years been sharpening her claws upon it and the leather now looked something like "Teddy Bear" material. These I distributed between the porter and the tout, and, trusting to Providence and my own powers of observation, we entered Irun.
Where was the queer magic which lies in the first impressions of a new land, the dreamlike quality, the unreality which almost puts one's feet for a moment into Fairyland? Spain had played a nasty trick upon us; the grey sky and the low-lying cloud and the drizzling rain had nothing of Fairyland for us. With head held low against the drizzle one was conscious of nothing but a wall on the right hand and of dirty pavement beneath the feet.