Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/193

 Poste Restante! Poste Restante! I scan envelope after envelope. I know the Poste Restante in New York, with its struggling striving crowd of German and Irish emigrants craving for news from the dear ones at home. In connexion with this department of the American postal service, I may mention that in the great Atlantic cities they have an admirable practice of issuing periodically, alphabetical lists of persons for whom letters have arrived by the European mails "to be left till called for," or whose addresses cannot be discovered. The latter cases are very numerous; letters addressed, "Franz Hermann, New York," or "My Cousin Biddy in Amerikey," not being uncommon.

I roam from pillar to post, always "Restante," and ten years slip away, and I come upon an envelope inscribed, "Poste Restante, Madrid." There is another name for this traveller's convenience in Spanish, but I have forgotten it. Otherwise "Poste Restante" belongs to the universal language. Everybody knows what it means. The Madrileña Poste Restante is like most other things of Spain: a marvel and a mystery. You reach the post-office itself, by a dirty street called, if I remember aright, the Calle de las Carretas, one of the thoroughfares branching from that Castilian Seven Dials the Puerta del Sol. Stop! I really must apologise for mentioning the name of the Puerta del Sol. I am mournfully aware that for the last nine weeks there has been going about town, in newspapers, in club rooms, at dinner tables, a ghastly and maleficent Bore. This is the Puerta del Sol Bore. Wither him! When he spares you the Puerta del Sol auger, he gives you a taste of the gimlet of the Calle de Alcalà, or drives you mad with the ratchet-drill of the Plaza Mayor. Scorch him! With his long-winded stories of what he said years to Zumalacarregui and what Mendizabal said to him. Choke him! With his interminable discourses about the "puchero," and the "tertullia," and the "Cocridas de novillos."

I don't want to be a bore, but it is not my fault if the chief post-office in Madrid be close to the Puerta del Sol. We must bow down before incontrovertible facts. The entrance to the office is in a dingy little alley lined with those agreeable blackened stone walls, relieved by dungeon-like barred windows, common in the cities of northern Spain. Opposite the post-office door, cower a few little bookstalls, where, too, you may buy cheap stationery; and there, too, in a little hutch, in aspect between a sentry-box and a cobbler's-stall, used to sit a public scribe, who, for the consideration of a few reals, would indite petitions for such suppliants as deemed that their prayers would be more readily listened to by authority if they were couched in words of four syllables and written in fat round characters with flourishes or "parafos" to all the terminals. The scribe also would write love-letters for lovelorn swains of either sex, whose education had been neglected.

I don't think I ever knew such a black, dirty, and decayed staircase as that of the Madrid post-office—save, perhaps, that of the Monte de PiétéMont de Piété [sic], Paris. You ascended, so it seemed, several flights, meeting on the way male and female phantoms shrouded in cloaks or in mantillas. The mingled odour of tobacco smoke, of garlic, and of Spain—for Spain has its peculiar though indescribable odour—was wonderful. The odds were rather against you, when you visited the Poste Restante, that the occasion might be a feast or a fast day of moment. In either case the office opened very late, and closed very early; and the hour selected for your own application was usually the wrong one. If the postal machine were in gear, you pushed aside a green baize door and entered a long low apartment, with a vaulted roof of stone. Stuck against the whitewashed walls, were huge placards covered with names, more or less illegible. Knots of soldiers in undress stood calmly contemplating those lists. I don't think a tithe of the starers expected any letters; it was only another way of passing the time. A group of shovel-hatted priests would be gravely scanning another list; a party of black-hooded women would be gossiping before a third; and everybody would be smoking.

You wandered into another vaulted room, and there you found your own series of lists—those of the "estrangeros." In the way of reading those lists, madness lay. The schedules belonging to several months, hung side by side. There were names repeated thrice over, names written in differently coloured inks, names crossed out, names blotted, names altered, names jobbed at with a penknife so as to be indecipherable, by some contemplative spirit in a sportive mood. The arrangment of names was alphabetical, but arbitrary. Sometimes the alphabet began at A and sometimes at T. The system of indexing was equally mysterious. I will suppose your name to be Septimus Terminus Optimus Penn. To this patronymic and