← catalogue

Familiar Spanish Travels

by William Dean Howells · English · Gutenberg #7430 · 586,635 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Familiar Spanish Travels
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: Familiar Spanish Travels

Author: William Dean Howells


        
Release date: February 1, 2005 [eBook #7430]
                Most recently updated: August 21, 2016

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7430

Credits: Produced by Eric Eldred, and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS ***




Produced by Eric Eldred





FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS


By W. D. Howells



               ILLUSTRATED
               HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
               NEW YORK AND LONDON
               MCMXIII
               COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY HARPER & BROTHERS
               PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
               PUBLISHED OCTOBER. 1913


TO M. H.


[Illustration: 01 PUERTA DEL SOL--GATE OF THE SUN--TOLEDO]


CONTENTS


     I. AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL APPROACHES

     II. SAN SEBASTIAN AND BEAUTIFUL BISCAY

     III. BURGOS AND THE BITTER COLD OF BURGOS

     IV. THE VARIETY OF VALLADOLID

     V. PHASES OF MADRID

     VI. A NIGHT AND DAY IN TOLEDO

     VII. THE GREAT GRIDIRON OF ST. LAWRENCE

     VIII. CORDOVA AND THE WAY THERE

     IX. FIRST DAYS IN SEVILLE

     X. SEVILLIAN ASPECTS AND INCIDENTS

     XI. TO AND IN GRANADA

     XII. THE SURPRISES OF RONDA

     XIII. ALGECIRAS AND TARIFA





FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS




I. AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL APPROACHES



I.

As the train took its time and ours in mounting the uplands toward
Granada on the soft, but not too soft, evening of November 6, 1911,
the air that came to me through the open window breathed as if from an
autumnal night of the middle eighteen-fifties in a little village of
northeastern Ohio. I was now going to see, for the first time, the city
where so great a part of my life was then passed, and in this magical
air the two epochs were blent in reciprocal association. The question of
my present identity was a thing indifferent and apart; it did not matter
who or where or when I was. Youth and age were at one with each other:
the boy abiding in the old man, and the old man pensively willing to
dwell for the enchanted moment in any vantage of the past which would
give him shelter.

In that dignified and deliberate Spanish train I was a man of
seventy-four crossing the last barrier of hills that helped keep Granada
from her conquerors, and at the same time I was a boy of seventeen in
the little room under the stairs in a house now practically remoter than
the Alhambra, finding my unguided way through some Spanish story of the
vanished kingdom of the Moors. The little room which had structurally
ceased fifty years before from the house that ceased to be home even
longer ago had returned to the world with me in it, and fitted perfectly
into the first-class railway compartment which my luxury had provided
for it. From its window I saw through the car window the olive groves
and white cottages of the Spanish peasants, and the American apple
orchards and meadows stretching to the primeval woods that walled the
drowsing village round. Then, as the night deepened with me at my book,
the train slipped slowly from the hills, and the moon, leaving the Ohio
village wholly in the dark, shone over the roofs and gardens of
Granada, and I was no longer a boy of seventeen, but altogether a man of
seventy-four.

I do not say the experience was so explicit as all this; no experience
so mystical could be so explicit; and perhaps what was intimated to
me in it was only that if I sometime meant to ask some gentle reader’s
company in a retrospect of my Spanish travels, I had better be honest
with him and own at the beginning that passion for Spanish things which
was the ruling passion of my boyhood; I had better confess that, however
unrequited, it held me in the eager bondage of a lover still, so that I
never wished to escape from it, but must try to hide the fact whenever
the real Spain fell below the ideal, however I might reason with
my infatuation or try to scoff it away. It had once been so
inextinguishable a part of me that the record of my journey must be more
or less autobiographical; and though I should decently endeavor to keep
my past out of it, perhaps I should not try very hard and should not
always succeed.

Just when this passion began in me I should not be able to say; but
probably it was with my first reading of _Don Quixote_ in the later
eighteen-forties. I would then have been ten or twelve years old; and,
of course, I read that incomparable romance, not only greatest, but sole
of its kind, in English. The purpose of some time reading it in Spanish
and then the purpose of some time writing the author’s life grew in me
with my growing years so strongly that, though I have never yet done
either and probably never shall, I should not despair of doing both if
I lived to be a hundred. In the mean time my wandering steps had early
chanced upon a Spanish grammar, and I had begun those inquiries in it
which were based upon a total ignorance of English accidence. I do not
remember how I felt my way from it to such reading of the language
as has endeared Spanish literature to me. It embraced something of
everything: literary and political history, drama, poetry, fiction;
but it never condescended to the exigencies of common parlance. These
exigencies did not exist for me in my dreams of seeing Spain which were
not really expectations. It was not until half a century later, when my
longing became a hope and then a purpose, that I foreboded the need of
practicable Spanish. Then I invoked the help of a young professor, who
came to me for an hour each day of a week in London and let me try to
talk with him; but even then I accumulated so little practicable Spanish
that my first hour, almost my first moment in Spain, exhausted my store.
My professor was from Barcelona, but he beautifully lisped his _c’s_
and _z’s_ like any old Castilian, when he might have hissed them in the
accent of his native Catalan; and there is no telling how much I might
have profited by his instruction if he had not been such a charming
intelligence that I liked to talk with him of literature and philosophy
and politics rather than the weather, or the cost of things, or the
question of how long the train stopped and when it would start, or the
dishes at table, or clothes at the tailor’s, or the forms of greeting
and parting. If he did not equip me with the useful colloquial phrases,
the fault was mine; and the misfortune was doubly mine when from my old
acquaintance with Italian (glib half-sister of the statelier Spanish)
the Italian phrases would thrust forward as the equivalent of the
English words I could not always think of. The truth is, then, that I
was not perfect in my Spanish after quite six weeks in Spain; and if
in the course of his travels with me the reader finds me flourishing
Spanish idioms in his face he may safely attribute them less to my
speaking than my reading knowledge: probably I never employed them in
conversation. That reading was itself without order or system, and I am
not sure but it had better been less than more. Yet who knows? The days,
or the nights of the days, in the eighteen-fifties went quickly, as
quickly as the years go now, and it would have all come to the present
pass whether that blind devotion to an alien literature had cloistered
my youth or not.

I do not know how, with the merciful make I am of, I should then have
cared so little, or else ignored so largely the cruelties I certainly
knew that the Spaniards had practised in the conquests of Mexico and
Peru. I knew of these things, and my heart was with the Incas and the
Aztecs, and yet somehow I could not punish the Spaniards for their
atrocious destruction of the only American civilizations. As nearly as I
can now say, I was of both sides, and wistful to reconcile them, though
I do not see now how it could have been done; and in my later hopes for
the softening of the human conditions I have found it hard to forgive
Pizarro for the overthrow of the most perfectly socialized state known
to history. I scarcely realized the base ingratitude of the Spanish
sovereigns to Columbus, and there were vast regions of history that I
had not penetrated till long afterward in pursuit of Spanish perfidy and
inhumanity, as in their monstrous misrule of Holland. When it came in
those earlier days to a question of sides between the Spaniards and
the Moors, as Washington Irving invited my boyhood to take it in his
chronicle of the conquest of Granada, I experienced on a larger scale my
difficulty in the case of the Mexicans and Peruvians. The case of these
had been reported to me in the school-readers, but here, now, was an
affair submitted to the mature judgment of a boy of twelve, and yet
I felt as helpless as I was at ten. Will it be credited that at
seventy-four I am still often in doubt which side I should have had win,
though I used to fight on both? Since the matter was settled more than
four hundred years ago, I will not give the reasons for my divided
allegiance. They would hardly avail now to reverse the tragic fate of
the Moors, and if I try I cannot altogether wish to reverse it. Whatever
Spanish misrule has been since Islam was overthrown in Granada, it has
been the error of law, and the rule of Islam at the best had always been
the effect of personal will, the caprice of despots high and low,
the unstatuted sufferance of slaves, high and low. The gloomiest and
cruelest error of Inquisitional Spain was nobler, with its adoration of
ideal womanhood, than the Mohammedan state with its sensual dreams of
Paradise. I will not pretend (as I very well might, and as I perhaps
ought) that I thought of these things, all or any, as our train began to
slope rather more rapidly toward Granada, and to find its way under
the rising moon over the storied Vega. I will as little pretend that my
attitude toward Spain was ever that of the impartial observer after
I crossed the border of that enchanted realm where we all have our
castles. I have thought it best to be open with the reader here at
the beginning, and I would not, if I could, deny him the pleasure of
doubting my word or disabling my judgment at any point he likes. In
return I shall only ask his patience when I strike too persistently the
chord of autobiography. That chord is part of the harmony between the
boy and the old man who made my Spanish journey together, and were
always accusing themselves, the first of dreaming and the last of
doddering: perhaps with equal justice. Is there really much difference
between the two?



II.

It was fully a month before that first night in Granada that I arrived
in Spain after some sixty years’ delay. During this period I had seen
almost every other interesting country in Europe. I had lived five
or six years in Italy; I had been several months in Germany; and a
fortnight in Holland; I had sojourned often in Paris; I had come and
gone a dozen times in England and lingered long each time; and yet I
had never once visited the land of my devotion. I had often wondered at
this, it was so wholly involuntary, and I had sometimes suffered from
the surprise of those who knew of my passion for Spain, and kept finding
out my dereliction, alleging the Sud-Express to Madrid as something that
left me without excuse. The very summer before last I got so far on the
way in London as to buy a Spanish phrase-book full of those inopportune
conversations with landlords, tailors, ticket-sellers, and casual
acquaintance or agreeable strangers. Yet I returned once more to America
with my desire, which was turning into a duty, unfulfilled; and when
once more I sailed for Europe in 1911 it was more with foreboding of
another failure than a prescience of fruition in my inveterate longing.
Even after that boldly decisive week of the professor in London I had my
doubts and my self-doubts. There were delays at London, delays at Paris,
delays at Tours; and when at last we crossed the Pyrenees and I found
myself in Spain, it was with an incredulity which followed me throughout
and lingered with me to the end. “Is this truly Spain, and am I actually
there?” the thing kept asking itself; and it asks itself still, in terms
that fit the accomplished fact.




II. SAN SEBASTIAN AND BEAUTIFUL BISCAY


Even at Irun, where we arrived in Spain from Bayonne, there began at
once to be temperamental differences which ought to have wrought against
my weird misgivings of my whereabouts. Only in Spain could a customs
inspector have felt of one tray in our trunks and then passed them
all with an air of such jaded aversion from an employ uncongenial to
a gentleman. Perhaps he was also loath to attempt any inquiry in that
Desperanto of French, English, and Spanish which raged around us; but
the porter to whom we had fallen, while I hesitated at our carriage door
whether I should summon him as _Mozo_ or _Usted,_ was master of that
_lingua franca_ and recovered us from the customs without question on
our part, and understood everything we could not, say. I like to think
he was a Basque, because I like the Basques so much for no reason that
I can think of. Their being always Carlists would certainly be no reason
with me, for I was never a Carlist; and perhaps my liking is only a
prejudice in their favor from the air of thrift and work which pervades
their beautiful province, or is an effect of their language as I first
saw it inscribed on the front of the Credit Lyonnais at Bayonne. It
looked so beautifully regular, so scholarly, so Latin, so sister to both
Spanish and Italian, so richly and musically voweled, and yet remained
so impenetrable to the most daring surmise, that I conceived at once
a profound admiration for the race which could keep such a language
to itself. When I remembered how blond, how red-blond our sinewy young
porter was, I could not well help breveting him of that race, and
honoring him because he could have read those words with the eyes that
were so blue amid the general Spanish blackness of eyes. He imparted a
quiet from his own calm to our nervousness, and if we had appealed to
him on the point I am sure he would have saved us from the error of
breakfasting in the station restaurant at the deceitful _table d’hote,_
though where else we should have breakfasted I do not know.



I.

One train left for San Sebastian while I was still lost in amaze that
what I had taken into my mouth for fried egg should be inwardly fish
and full of bones; but he quelled my anxiety with the assurance, which I
somehow understood, that there would be another train soon. In the mean
time there were most acceptable Spanish families all about, affably
conversing together, and freely admitting to their conversation the
children, who so publicly abound in Spain, and the nurses who do nothing
to prevent their publicity. There were already the typical fat Spanish
mothers and lean fathers, with the slender daughters, who, in the
tradition of Spanish good-breeding, kept their black eyes to themselves,
or only lent them to the spectators in furtive glances. Both older
and younger ladies wore the scanty Egyptian skirt of Occidental
civilization, lurking or perking in deep-drooping or high-raking hats,
though already here and there was the mantilla, which would more and
more prevail as we went southward; older and younger, they were all
painted and powdered to the favor that Spanish women everywhere corne
to.

When the bad breakfast was over, and the waiters were laying the table
for another as bad, our Basque porter came in and led us to the train
for San Sebastian which he had promised us. It was now raining outside,
and we were glad to climb into our apartment without at all seeing what
Irun was or was not like. But we thought well of the place because we
first experienced there the ample ease of a Spanish car. In Spain the
railroad gauge is five feet six inches; and this car of ours was not
only very spacious, but very clean, while the French cars that had
brought us from Bordeaux to Bayonne and from Bayonne to Irun were
neither. I do not say all French cars are dirty, or all Spanish cars are
as clean as they are spacious. The cars of both countries are hard
to get into, by steep narrow footholds worse even than our flights of
steps; in fact, the English cars are the only ones I know which are easy
of access. But these have not the ample racks for hand-bags which the
Spanish companies provide for travelers willing to take advantage of
their trust by transferring much of their heavy stuff to them. Without
owning that we were such travelers, I find this the place to say that,
with the allowance of a hundred and thirty-two pounds free, our excess
baggage in two large steamer-trunks did not cost us three dollars in
a month’s travel, with many detours, from Irun in the extreme north to
Algeciras in the extreme south of Spain.



II.

But in this sordid detail I am keeping the reader from the scenery. It
had been growing more and more striking ever since we began climbing
into the Pyrenees from Bayonne; but upon the whole it was not so sublime
as it was beautiful. There were some steep, sharp peaks, but mostly
there were grassy valleys with white cattle grazing in them, and many
fields of Indian corn, endearingly homelike. This at least is mainly the
trace that the scenery as far as Irun has left among my notes; and after
Irun there is record of more and more corn. There was, in fact,
more corn than anything else, though there were many orchards, also
endearingly homelike, with apples yellow and red showing among the
leaves still green on the trees; if there had been something more
wasteful in the farming it would have been still more homelike, but a
traveler cannot have everything. The hillsides were often terraced,
as in Italy, and the culture apparently close and conscientious. The
farmhouses looked friendly and comfortable; at places the landscape was
molested by some sort of manufactories which could not conceal their
tall chimneys, though they kept the secret of their industry. They were
never, really, very bad, and I would have been willing to let them pass
for fulling-mills, such as I was so familiar with in _Don Quixote,_ if
I had thought of these in time. But one ought to be honest at any cost,
and I must own that the Spain I was now for the first time seeing with
every-day eyes was so little like the Spain of my boyish vision that I
never once recurred to it. That was a Spain of cork-trees, of groves
by the green margins of mountain brooks, of habitable hills, where
shepherds might feed their flocks and mad lovers and maids forlorn might
wander and maunder; and here were fields of corn and apple orchards and
vineyards reddening and yellowing up to the doors of those comfortable
farmhouses, with nowhere the sign of a Christian cavalier or a turbaned
infidel. As a man I could not help liking what I saw, but I could also
grieve for the boy who would have been so disappointed if he had come to
the Basque provinces of Spain when he was from ten to fifteen years old,
instead of seventy-four.

It took our train nearly an hour to get by twenty miles of those
pleasant farms and the pretty hamlets which they now and then clustered
into. But that was fast for a Spanish way-train, which does not run,
but, as it were, walks with dignity and makes long stops at stations,
to rest and let the locomotive roll itself a cigarette. By the time we
reached San Sebastian our rain had thickened to a heavy downpour, and
by the time we mounted to our rooms, three pair up in the hotel, it
was storming in a fine fury over the bay under them, and sweeping the
curving quays and tossing the feathery foliage of the tamarisk-shaded
promenade. The distinct advantage of our lofty perch was the splendid
sight of the tempest, held from doing its worst by the mighty headlands
standing out to sea on the right and left. But our rooms were cold with
the stony cold of the south when it is cooling off from its summer, and
we shivered in the splendid sight.



III.

The inhabitants of San Sebastian will not hesitate to say that it is the
prettiest town in Spain, and I do not know that they could be hopefully
contradicted. It is very modern in its more obvious aspects, with a
noble thoroughfare called the Avenida de Libertad for its principal
street, shaded with a double row of those feathery tamarisks, and with
handsome shops glittering on both sides of it. Very easily it is first
of the fashionable watering-places of Spain; the King has his villa
there, and the court comes every summer. But they had gone by the time
we got there, and the town wore the dejected look of out-of-season
summer resorts; though there was the apparatus of gaiety, the fine
casino at one end of the beach, and the villas of the rich and noble all
along it to the other end. On the sand were still many bathing-machines,
but many others had begun to climb for greater safety during the winter
to the street above. We saw one hardy bather dripping up from the surf
and seeking shelter among those that remained, but they were mostly
tenanted by their owners, who looked shoreward through their open doors,
and made no secret of their cozy domesticity, where they sat and sewed
or knitted and gossiped with their neighbors. Good wives and mothers
they doubtless were, but no doubt glad to be resting from the summer
pleasure of others. They had their beautiful names written up over their
doors, and were for the service of the lady visitors only; there were
other machines for gentlemen, and no doubt it was their owners whom
we saw gathering the fat seaweed thrown up by the storm into the carts
drawn by oxen over the sand. The oxen wore no yokes, but pulled by a
band drawn over their foreheads under their horns, and they had the air
of not liking the arrangement; though, for the matter of that, I have
never seen oxen that seemed to like being yoked.


[Illustration: 02 THE CASINO, SAN SEBASTIAN, LOOKS OUT UPON THE CURVING CONCHA AND THE BLUE BAY]

When we came down to dinner we found the tables fairly full of belated
visitors, who presently proved tourists flying south like ourselves.
The dinner was good, as it is in nearly all Spanish hotels, where for an
average of three dollars a day you have an inclusive rate which you must
double for as good accommodation in our States. Let no one, I say, fear
the rank cookery so much imagined of the Peninsula, the oil, the pepper,
the kid and the like strange meats; as in all other countries of Europe,
even England itself, there is a local version, a general convention of
the French cuisine, quite as good in Spain as elsewhere, and oftener
superabundant than subabundant. The plain water is generally good, With
an American edge of freshness; but if you will not trust it (we had to
learn to trust it) there are agreeable Spanish mineral waters, as
well as the Apollinaris, the St. Galmier, and the Perrier of other
civilizations, to be had for the asking, at rather greater cost than the
good native wines, often included in the inclusive rate.

Besides this convention of the French cuisine there is almost everywhere
a convention of the English language in some one of the waiters. You
must not stray far from the beaten path of your immediate wants, but in
this you are safe. At San Sebastian we had even a wider range with the
English of the little intellectual-looking, pale Spanish waiter, with
a fine Napoleonic head, who came to my help when I began to flounder in
the language which I had read so much and spoken so little or none. He
had been a year in London, he said, and he took us for English, though,
now he came to notice it, he perceived we were Americans because we
spoke “quicklier” than the English. We did not protest; it was the
mildest criticism of our national accent which we were destined to
get from English-speaking Spaniards before they found we were not the
English we did not wish to be taken for. After dinner we asked for a
fire in one of our grates, but the maid declared there was no fuel; and,
though the hostess denied this and promised us a fire the next night,
she forgot it till nine o’clock, and then we would not have it. The cold
abode with us indoors to the last at San Sebastian, but the storm (which
had hummed and whistled theatrically at our windows) broke during the
first night, and the day followed with several intervals of sunshine,
which bathed us in a glowing-expectation of overtaking the fugitive
summer farther south.



IV.

In the mean time we hired a beautiful Basque cabman with a red Basque
cap and high-hooked Basque nose to drive us about at something above
the legal rate and let us not leave any worthy thing in San Sebastian
unseen. He took us, naturally, to several churches, old and new, with
their Gothic and rococo interiors, which I still find glooming and
glinting among my evermore thickening impressions of like things. We got
from them the sense of that architectural and sculptural richness which
the interior of no Spanish church ever failed measurably to give; but
what their historical associations were I will not offer to say. The
associations of San Sebastian with the past are in all things vague, at
least for me. She was indeed taken from the French by the English under
Wellington during the Peninsular War, but of older, if not unhappier
farther-off days and battles longer ago her history as I know it seems
to know little. It knows of savage and merciless battles between the
partisans of Don Carlos and those of Queen Isabella so few decades since
as not to be the stuff of mere pathos yet, and I am not able to blink
the fact that my beloved Basques fought on the wrong side, when they
need not have fought at all. Why they were Carlists they could perhaps
no more say than I could. The monumental historic fact is that the
Basques have been where they are immeasurably beyond the memories of
other men; what the scope of their own memories is one could perhaps
confidently say only in Basque if one could say anything. Of course,
in the nature of things, the Phoenicians must have been there and the
Greeks, doubtless, if they ever got outside of the Pillars of Hercules;
the Romans, of course, must have settled and civilized and then
Christianized the province. It is next neighbor to that province of
Asturias in which alone the Arabs failed to conquer the Goths, and from
which Spain was to live and grow again and recover all her losses from
the Moors; but what the share of San Sebastian was in this heroic fate,
again I must leave the Basques to say. They would doubtless say it with
sufficient self-respect, for wherever we came in contact that day with
the Basque nature we could not help imagining in it a sense of racial
merit equaling that of the Welsh themselves, who are indeed another
branch of the same immemorial Iberian stock, if the Basques are
Iberians. Like the Welsh, they have the devout tradition that they
never were conquered, but yielded to circumstances when these became too
strong for them.

Among the ancient Spanish liberties which were restricted by the
consolidating monarchy from age to age, the Basque _fueros,_ or rights,
were the oldest; they lasted quite to our own day; and although it is
known to more ignorant men that these privileges (including immunity
from conscription) have now been abrogated, the custodian of the House
of Provincial Deputies, whom our driver took us to visit, was such a
glowing Basque patriot that he treated them as in full force. His pride
in the seat of the local government spared us no detail of the whole
electric-lighting system, or even the hose-bibs for guarding the edifice
against fire, let alone every picture and photograph on the wall of
every chamber of greater or less dignity, with every notable table and
chair. He certainly earned the peseta I gave him, but he would have done
far more for it if we had suffered him to take us up another flight
of stairs; and he followed us in our descent with bows and adieux that
ought to have left no doubt in our minds of the persistence of the
Basque _fueros._



V.

It was to such a powerful embodiment of the local patriotism that our
driver had brought us from another civic palace overlooking the Plaza de
la Constitution, chiefly notable now for having been the old theater of
the bull-fights. The windows in the houses round still bear the numbers
by which they were sold to spectators as boxes; but now the municipality
has built a beautiful brand-new bull-ring in San Sebastian; and I do not
know just why we were required to inspect the interior of the edifice
overlooking this square. I only know that at sight of our bewilderment
a workman doing something to the staircase clapped his hands orientally,
and the custodian was quickly upon us in response to a form of summons
which we were to find so often used in Spain. He was not so crushingly
upon us as that other custodian; he was apologetically proud, rather
than boastfully; at times he waved his hands in deprecation, and would
have made us observe that the place was little, very little; he deplored
it like a host who wishes his possessions praised. Among the artistic
treasures of the place from which he did not excuse us there were some
pen-drawings, such as writing-masters execute without lifting the
pen from the paper, by a native of South America, probably of Basque
descent, since the Basques have done so much to people that continent.
We not only admired these, but we would not consent to any of the
custodian’s deprecations, especially when it came to question of the
pretty salon in which Queen Victoria was received on her first visit to
San Sebastian. We supposed then, and in fact I had supposed till this
moment, that it was Queen Victoria of Great Britain who was meant; but
now I realize that it must have been the queen consort of Spain, who
seems already to have made herself so liked there.

She, of course, comes every summer to San Sebastian, and presently our
driver took us to see the royal villa by the shore, withdrawn, perhaps
from a sense of its extreme plainness, not to say ugliness, among its
trees and vines behind its gates and walls. Our driver excused himself
for not being able to show us through it; he gladly made us free of
an unrestricted view of the royal bathing-pavilion, much more frankly
splendid in its gilding, beside the beach. Other villas ranked
themselves along the hillside, testifying to the gaiety of the social
life in summers past and summers to come. In the summer just past the
gaiety may have been interrupted by the strikes taking in the newspapers
the revolutionary complexion which it was now said they did not wear. At
least, when the King had lately come to fetch the royal household
away nothing whatever happened, and the “constitutional guarantees,”
 suspended amidst the ministerial anxieties, were restored during the
month, with the ironical applause of the liberal press, which pretended
that there had never been any need of their suspension.

[Illustration: 03 THE SEA SWEEPS INLAND IN A CIRCLE OF BLUE, TO FORM THE ENTRANCE TO THE HARBOR, SAN SEBASTIAN]



VI.

All pleasures, mixed or unmixed, must end, and the qualified joy of our
drive through San Sebastian came to a close on our return to our hotel
well within the second hour, almost within its first half. When I
proposed paying our driver for the exact time, he drooped upon his box
and, remembering my remorse in former years for standing upon my just
rights in such matters, I increased the fare, peseta by peseta, till his
sinking spirits rose, and he smiled gratefully upon me and touched his
brave red cap as he drove away. He had earned his money, if racking his
invention for objects of interest in San Sebastian was a merit. At the
end we were satisfied that it was a well-built town with regular blocks
in the modern quarter, and not without the charm of picturesqueness
which comes of narrow and crooked lanes in the older parts. Prescient of
the incalculable riches before us, we did not ask much of it, and we got
all we asked. I should be grateful to San Sebastian, if for nothing
else than the two very Spanish experiences I had there. One concerned a
letter for me which had been refused by the bankers named in my letter
of credit, from a want of faith, I suppose, in my coming. When I did
come I was told that I would find it at the post-office. That would be
well enough when I found the post-office, which ought to have been easy
enough, but which presented certain difficulties in the driving rain of
our first afternoon. At last in a fine square I asked a fellow-man in
my best conversational Spanish where the post-office was, and after a
moment’s apparent suffering he returned, “Do you speak English?” “Yes.”
 I said, “and I am so glad you do.” “Not at all. I don’t speak anything
else. Great pleasure. There is the post-office,” and it seemed that I
had hardly escaped collision with it. But this was the beginning, not
the end, of my troubles. When I showed my card to the _poste restante_
clerk, he went carefully through the letters bearing the initial of my
name and denied that there was any for me. We entered into reciprocally
bewildering explanations, and parted altogether baffled. Then, at
the hotel, I consulted with a capable young office-lady, who tardily
developed a knowledge of English, and we agreed that it would be well to
send the _chico_ to the post-office for it. The _chico,_ corresponding
in a Spanish hotel to a _piccolo_ in Germany or a page in England, or
our own now evanescing bell-boy, was to get a _peseta_ for bringing me
the letter. He got the _peseta,_ though he only brought me word that
the authorities would send the letter to the hotel by the postman that
night. The authorities did not send it that night, and the next morning
I recurred to my bankers. There, on my entreaty for some one who could
meet my Spanish at least half-way in English, a manager of the bank came
out of his office and reassured me concerning the letter which I had
now begun to imagine the most important I had ever missed. Even while we
talked the postman came in and owned having taken the letter back to the
office. He voluntarily promised to bring it to the bank at one o’clock,
when I hastened to meet him. At that hour every one was out at lunch; I
came again at four, when everybody had returned, but the letter was not
delivered; at five, just before the bank closed, the letter, which had
now grown from a _carta_ to a _cartela,_ was still on its way. I left
San Sebastian without it; and will it be credited that when it was
forwarded to me a week later at Madrid it proved the most fatuous
missive imaginable, wholly concerning the writer’s own affairs and none
of mine?

I cannot guess yet why it was withheld from me, but since the incident
brought me that experience of Spanish politeness, I cannot grieve for
it. The young banker who left his region of high finance to come out and
condole with me, in apologizing for the original refusal of my letter,
would not be contented with so little. Nothing would satisfy him but
going with me, on my hinted purpose, and inquiring with me at the
railroad office into the whole business of circular tickets, and even
those kilometric tickets which the Spanish railroads issue to such
passengers as will have their photographs affixed to them for the
prevention of transference. As it seemed advisable not to go to this
extreme till I got to Madrid, my kind young banker put himself at my
disposal for any other service I could imagine from him; but I searched
myself in vain for any desire, much less necessity, and I parted from
him at the door of his bank with the best possible opinion of the
Basques. I suppose he was a Basque; at any rate, he was blond, which
the Spaniards are mostly not, and the Basques often are. Now I am sorry,
since he was so kind, that I did not get him to read me the Basque
inscription on the front of his bank, which looked exactly like that on
the bank at Bayonne; I should not have understood it, but I should have
known what it sounded like, if it sounded like anything but Basque.

Everybody in San Sebastian seemed resolved to outdo every other in
kindness. In a shop where we endeavored to explain that we wanted to get
a flat cap which should be both Basque and red, a lady who was buying
herself a hat asked in English if she could help us. When we gladly
answered that she could, she was silent, almost to tears, and it
appeared that in this generous offer of aid she had exhausted her
whole stock of English. Her mortification, her painful surprise, at the
strange catastrophe, was really pitiable, and we hastened to escape
from it to a shop across the street. There instantly a small boy rushed
enterprisingly out and brought back with him a very pretty girl who
spoke most of the little French which has made its way in San Sebastian
against the combined Basque and Spanish, and a cap of the right flatness
and redness was brought. I must not forget, among the pleasures done us
by the place, the pastry cook’s shop which advertised in English “Tea
at all Hours,” and which at that hour of our afternoon we now found so
opportune, that it seemed almost personally attentive to us as the only
Anglo-Saxon visitors in town. The tea might have been better, but it was
as good as it knew how; and the small boy who came in with his mother
(the Spanish mother seldom fails of the company of a small boy) in her
moments of distraction succeeded in touching with his finger all the
pieces of pastry except those we were eating.



VII.

The high aquiline nose which is characteristic of the autochthonic race
abounds in San Sebastian, but we saw no signs of the high temper which
is said to go with it. This, indeed, was known to me chiefly from my
first reading in _Don Quixote,_ of the terrific combat between the
squire of the Biscayan ladies whose carriage the knight of La Mancha
stopped after his engagement with the windmills. In their exchange of
insults incident to the knight’s desire that the ladies should go to
Toboso and thank Dulcinea for his delivery of them from the necromancers
he had put to flight in the persons of two Benedictine monks, “‘Get
gone,’ the squire called, in bad Spanish and worse Biscayan, ‘Get gone,
thou knight, and Devil go with thou; or by He Who me create... me kill
thee now so sure as me be Biscayan,’” and when the knight called him an
“inconsiderable mortal,” and said that if he were a gentleman he would
chastise him: “‘What! me no gentleman?’ replied the Biscayan. ‘I swear
thou be liar as me be Christian.... Me will show thee me be Biscayan,
and gentleman by land, gentleman by sea, gentleman in spite of Devil;
and thou lie if thou say the contrary.’”

It is a scene which will have lived in the memory of every reader, and
I recurred to it hopefully but vainly in San Sebastian, where this
fiery threefold gentleman might have lived in his time. It would be
interesting to know how far the Basques speak broken Spanish in a
fashion of their own, which Cervantes tried to represent in the talk
of his Biscayan. Like the Welsh again they strenuously keep their
immemorial language against the inroads of the neighboring speech. How
much they fix it in a modern literature it would be easier to ask than
to say. I suppose there must be Basque newspapers; perhaps there are
Basque novelists, there are notoriously Basque bards who recite their
verses to the peasants, and doubtless there are poets who print their
rhymes: and I blame myself for not inquiring further concerning them of
that kindly Basque banker who wished so much to do something for me in
compensation for the loss of my worthless letter. I knew, too cheaply,
that the Basques have their poetical contests, as the Welsh have their
musical competitions in the Eisteddfod, and they are once more like the
Welsh, their brothers in antiquity, in calling themselves by a national
name of their own. They call themselves Euskaldunac, which is as
different from the name of Basque given them by the alien races as Cymru
is from Welsh.

All this lore I have easily accumulated from the guide-books since
leaving San Sebastian, but I was carelessly ignorant of it in driving
from the hotel to the station when we came away, and was much concerned
in the overtures made us in a mixed Spanish, English, and French by a
charming family from Chili, through the brother to one of the ladies and
luisband to the other. When he perceived from my Spanish that we were
not English, he rejoiced that we were Americans of the north, and as
joyfully proclaimed that they were Americans of the south. We were
at once sensible of a community of spirit in our difference from our
different ancestral races. They were Spanish, but with a New World
blitheness which we nowhere afterward found in the native Spaniards; and
we were English, with a willingness to laugh and to joke which they had
not perhaps noted in our ancestral contemporaries. Again and again we
met them in the different cities where we feared we had lost them, until
we feared no more and counted confidently on seeing them wherever we
went. They were always radiantly smiling; and upon this narrow ground I
am going to base the conjecture that the most distinctive difference of
the Western Hemisphere from the Eastern is its habit of seeing the
fun of things. With those dear Chilians we saw the fun of many little
hardships of travel which might have been insupportable without the
vision. Sometimes we surprised one another in the same hotel; sometimes
it was in the street that we encountered, usually to exchange
amusing misfortunes. If we could have been constantly with these
fellow-hemispherists our progress through Spain would have been an
unbroken holiday.

There is a superstition of travelers in Spain, much fostered by
innkeepers and porters, that you cannot get seats in the fast trains
without buying your tickets the day before, and then perhaps not, and
we abandoned ourselves to this fear at San Sebastian so far as to get
places some hours in advance. But once established in the ten-foot-wide
interior of the first-class compartment which we had to ourselves, every
anxiety fell from us; and I do not know a more flattering emotion than
that which you experience in sinking into your luxurious seat, and,
after a glance at your hand-bags in the racks where they have been put
with no strain on your own muscles, giving your eyes altogether to the
joy of the novel landscape.

The train was what they call a Rapido in Spain; and though we were
supposed to be devouring space with indiscriminate gluttony, I do not
think that in our mad rush of twenty-five miles an hour we failed to
taste any essential detail of the scenery..But I wish now that I had
known the Basques were all nobles, and that the peasants owned many of
the little farms we saw declaring the general thrift. In the first two
hours of the six to Burgos we ran through lovely valleys held in the
embrace of gentle hills, where the fields of Indian corn were varied by
groves of chestnut trees, where we could see the burrs gaping on their
stems. The blades and tassels of the corn had been stripped away,
leaving the ripe ears a-tilt at the top of the stalks, which looked
like cranes standing on one leg with their heads slanted in pensive
contemplation. There were no vineyards, but orchards aplenty near the
farmhouses, and all about there were other trees pollarded to the quick
and tufted with mistletoe, not only the stout oaks, but the slim poplars
trimmed up into tall plumes like the poplars in southern France. The
houses, when they did not stand apart like our own farmhouses, gathered
into gray-brown villages around some high-shouldered church with a
bell-tower in front or at one corner of the fagade. In most of the
larger houses an economy of the sun’s heat, the only heat recognized
in the winter of southern countries, was practised by glassing in the
balconies that stretched quite across their fronts and kept the cold
from at least one story. It gave them a very cheery look, and must have
made them livable at least in the daytime. Now and then the tall chimney
of one of those manufactories we had seen on the way from Irun invited
belief in the march of industrial prosperity; but whether the Basque who
took work in a mill or a foundry forfeited his nobility remained a part
of the universal Basque secret. From time to time a mountain stream
brawled from under a world-old bridge, and then spread a quiet tide for
the women to kneel beside and wash the clothes which they spread to dry
on every bush and grassy slope of the banks.

The whole scene changed after we ran out of the Basque country and into
the austere landscape of old Castile. The hills retreated and swelled
into mountains that were not less than terrible in their savage
nakedness. The fields of corn and the orchards ceased, and the green of
the pastures changed to the tawny gray of the measureless wheat-lands
into which the valleys flattened and widened. There were no longer any
factory chimneys; the villages seemed to turn from stone to mud; the
human poverty showed itself in the few patched and tattered figures that
followed the oxen in the interminable furrows shallowly scraping the
surface of the lonely levels. The haggard mountain ranges were of stone
that seemed blanched with geologic superannuation, and at one place we
ran by a wall of hoary rock that drew its line a mile long against
the sky, and then broke and fell, and then staggered up again in a
succession of titanic bulks. But stupendous as these mountain masses
were, they were not so wonderful as those wheat-lands which in
harvest-time must wash their shores like a sea of gold. Where these now
rose and sank with the long ground-swell of the plains in our own West,
a thin gray stubble covered them from the feeble culture which leaves
Spain, for all their extent in both the Castiles, in Estremadura, in
Andalusia, still without bread enough to feed herself, and obliges
her to import alien wheat. At the lunch which we had so good in the
dining-car we kept our talk to the wonder of the scenery, and well away
from the interesting Spanish pair at our table. It is never safe in
Latin Europe to count upon ignorance of English in educated people, or
people who look so; and with these we had the reward of our prudence
when the husband asked after dessert if we minded his smoking. His
English seemed meant to open the way for talk, and we were willing he
should do the talking. He spoke without a trace of accent, and we at
once imagined circles in which it was now as _chic_ for Spaniards to
speak English as it once was to speak French. They are said never to
speak French quite well; but nobody could have spoken English better
than this gentleman, not even we who were, as he said he supposed,
English. Truth and patriotism both obliged us to deny his conjecture;
and when He intimated that he would not have known us for Americans
because we did not speak with the dreadful American accent, I hazarded
my belief that this dreadfulness was personal rather than national. But
he would not have it. Boston people, yes; they spoke very well, and he
allowed other exceptions to the general rule of our nasal twang, which
his wife summoned English enough to say was very ugly. They had suffered
from it too universally in the Americans they had met during the summer
in Germany to believe it was merely personal; and I suppose one may own
to strictly American readers that our speech _is_ dreadful, that it is
very ugly. These amiable Spaniards had no reason and no wish to
wound; and they could never know what sweet and noble natures had been
producing their voices through their noses there in Germany. I for my
part could not insist; who, indeed, can defend the American accent,
which is not so much an accent as a whiffle, a snuffle, a twang? It was
mortifying, all the same, to have it openly abhorred by a foreigner, and
I willingly got away from the question to that of the weather. We agreed
admirably about the heat in England where this gentleman went every
summer, and had never found it so hot before. It was hot even in
Denmark; but he warned me not to expect any warmth in Spain now that the
autumn rains had begun.

If this couple represented a cosmopolitan and modern Spain, it was
interesting to escape to something entirely native in the three young
girls who got in at the next station and shared our compartment with us
as far as we went. They were tenderly kissed by their father in putting
them on board, and held in lingering farewells at the window till the
train started. The eldest of the three then helped in arranging their
baskets in the rack, but the middle sister took motherly charge of the
youngest, whom she at once explained to us as _enferma._ She was
the prettiest girl of the conventional Spanish type we Lad yet seen:
dark-eyed and dark-haired, regular, but a little overfull of the chin
which she would presently have double. She was very, very pale of face,
with a pallor in which she had assisted nature with powder, as all
Spanish women, old and young, seem to do. But there was no red underglow
in the pallor, such as gives many lovely faces among them the complexion
of whitewash over pink on a stucco surface. She wrapped up the youngest
sister, who would by and by be beautiful, and now being sick had only
the flush of fever in her cheeks, and propped her in the coziest corner
of the car, where she tried to make her keep still, but could not make
her keep silent. In fact, they all babbled together, over the basket of
luncheon which the middle sister opened after springing up the little
table-leaf of the window, and spread with a substantial variety
including fowl and sausage and fruit, such as might tempt any sick
appetite, or a well one, even. As she brought out each of these
victuals, together with a bottle of wine and a large bottle of milk, she
first offered it to us, and when it was duly refused with thanks, she
made the invalid eat and drink, especially the milk which she made a wry
face at. When she had finished they all began to question whether her
fever was rising for the day; the good sister felt the girl’s pulse, and
got out a thermometer, which together they arranged under her arm, and
then duly inspected. It seemed that the fever _was_ rising, as it might
very well be, but the middle sister was not moved from her notable calm,
and the eldest did not fear. At a place where a class of young men
was to be seen before an ecclesiastical college the girls looked out
together, and joyfully decided that the brother (or possibly a cousin)
whom they expected to see, was really there among them. When we reached
Burgos we felt that we had assisted at a drama of family medicine and
affection which was so sweet that if the fever was not very wisely it
was very winningly treated. It was not perhaps a very serious case, and
it meant a good deal of pleasant excitement for all concerned.




III. BURGOS AND THE BITTER COLD OF BURGOS


It appears to be the use in most minor cities of Spain for the best
hotel to send the worst omnibus to the station, as who should say, “Good
wine needs no bush.” At Burgos we were almost alarmed by the shabbiness
of the omnibus for the hotel we had chosen through a consensus of praise
in the guide-books, and thought we must have got the wrong one. It was
indeed the wrong one, but because there is no right hotel in Burgos
when you arrive there on an afternoon of early October, and feel the
prophetic chill of that nine months of winter which is said to contrast
there with three months of hell.



I


The air of Burgos when it is not the breath of a furnace is so heavy and
clammy through the testimony of all comers that Burgos herself no longer
attempts to deny it from her high perch on the uplands of Old Castile.
Just when she ceased to deny it, I do not know, but probably when she
ceased to be the sole capital and metropolis of Christian Spain and
shared her primacy with Toledo sometime in the fourteenth century. Now,
in the twentieth, we asked nothing of her but two rooms in which we
could have fire, but the best hotel in Burgos openly declared that it
had not a fireplace in its whole extent, though there must have been one
in the kitchen. The landlord pointed out that it was completely equipped
with steam-heating apparatus, but when I made him observe that there was
no steam in the shining radiators, he owned with a shrug that there was
truth in what I said. He showed us large, pleasant rooms to the south
which would have been warm from the sun if the sun which we left playing
in San Sebastian had been working that day at Burgos; he showed us his
beautiful new dining-room, cold, with the same sunny exposure. I rashly
declared that all would not do, and that I would look elsewhere for
rooms with fireplaces. I had first to find a cab in order to find
the other hotels, but I found instead that in a city of thirty-eight
thousand inhabitants there was not one cab standing for hire in the
streets. I tried to enlist the sympathies of some private carriages, but
they remained indifferent, and I went back foiled, but not crushed,
to our hotel. There it seemed that the only vehicle to be had was the
omnibus which had brought us from the station. The landlord calmly (I
did not then perceive the irony of his calm) had the horses put to
and our baggage put on, and we drove away. But first we met our dear
Chilians coming to our hotel from the hotel they had chosen, and from a
search for hearthstones in others; and we drove to the only hotel they
had left unvisited. There at our demand for fires the landlord all but
laughed us to scorn; he laid his hand on the cold radiator in the
hotel as if to ask what better we could wish than that. We drove back,
humbled, to our own hotel, where the landlord met us with the Castilian
cairn he had kept at our departure. Then there was nothing for me but
to declare myself the Prodigal Son returned to take the rooms he
had offered us. We were so perfectly in his power that he could
magnanimously afford to offer us other rooms equally cold, but we did
not care to move. The Chilians had retired baffled to their own hotel,
and there was nothing for us but to accept the long evening of gelid
torpor which we foresaw must follow the effort of the soup and wine to
warm us at dinner. That night we heard through our closed doors agonized
voices which we knew to be the voices of despairing American women
wailing through the freezing corridors, “Can’t she understand that
I want _boiling_ water?” and, “Can’t’ we go down-stairs to a fire
somewhere?” We knew the one meant the chambermaid and the other the
kitchen, but apparently neither prayer was answered.

[Illustration: 04 GROUPS OF WOMEN ON THEIR KNEES BEATING CLOTHES IN THE WATER]



II


As soon as we had accepted our fate, while as yet the sun had not set
behind the clouds which had kept it out of our rooms all day, we hurried
out not only to escape the rigors of our hotel, but to see as soon as we
could, as much as we could of the famous city. We had got an excellent
cup of tea in the glass-roofed pavilion of our beautiful cold
dining-room, and now our spirits rose level with the opportunities of
the entrancing walk we took along the course of the Arlanson. I say
course, because that is the right word to use of a river, but really
there was no course in the Arlanzon. Between the fine, wide Embankments
and under the noble bridges there were smooth expanses of water
(naturally with women washing at them), which reflected like an
afterglow of the evening sky the splendid masses of yarn hung red from
the dyer’s vats on the bank. The expanses of water were bordered by
wider spaces of grass which had grown during the rainless summer, but
which were no doubt soon to be submerged under the autumnal torrent the
river would become. The street which shaped itself to the stream was
a rather modern avenue, leading to a beautiful public garden, with the
statues and fountains proper to a public garden, and densely shaded
against the three infernal months of the Burgos year. But the houses
were glazed all along their fronts with the sun-traps which we had noted
in the Basque country, and which do not wait for a certain date in the
almanac to do the work of steam-heating. They gave a tempting effect to
the house-fronts, but they could not distract our admiration from the
successive crowds of small boys playing at bull-fighting in the streets
below, and in the walks of the public garden. The population of
Burgos is above thirty-seven thousand and of the inhabitants at
least thirty-six thousand are small boys, as I was convinced by the
computation of the husband and brother of the Chilian ladies which
agreed perfectly with my own hasty conjecture; the rest are small girls.
In fact large families, and large families chiefly of boys, are the rule
in Spain everywhere; and they everywhere know how to play bull-fighting,
to flap any-colored old shawl, or breadth of cloth in the face of
the bull, to avoid his furious charges, and doubtless to deal him his
death-wound, though to this climax I could not bear to follow.

[Illustration: 05 THE IRON-GRAY BULK OF THE CATHEDRAL REARS ITSELF FROM CLUSTERING WALLS AND ROOFS]

One or two of the bull-fighters offered to leave the national sport
and show us the House of Miranda, but it was the cathedral which was
dominating our desire, as it everywhere dominates the vision, in Burgos
and out of Burgos as far as the city can be seen. The iron-gray bulk,
all flattered or fretted by Gothic art, rears itself from the clustering
brown walls and roofs of the city, which it seems to gather into its
mass below while it towers so far above them. We needed no pointing of
the way to it; rather we should have needed instruction for shunning it;
but we chose the way which led through the gate of Santa Maria where
in an arch once part of the city wall, the great Cid, hero above every
other hero of Burgos, sits with half a dozen more or less fabled or
storied worthies of the renowned city. Then with a minute’s walk up
a stony sloping little street we were in the beautiful and reverend
presence of one of the most august temples of the Christian faith. The
avenue where the old Castilian nobles once dwelt in their now empty
palaces climbs along the hillside above the cathedral, which on its
lower side seems to elbow off the homes of meaner men, and in front to
push them away beyond a plaza not large enough for it. Even this the
cathedral had not cleared of the horde of small boys who followed us
unbidden to its doors and almost expropriated those authorized blind
beggars who own the church doors in Spain. When we declined the further
company of these boys they left us with expressions which I am afraid
accused our judgment and our personal appearance; but in another moment
we were safe from their censure, and hidden as it were in the thick
smell of immemorial incense.

It was not the moment for doing the cathedral in the wonted tiresome and
vulgar way; that was reserved for the next day; now we simply wandered
in the vast twilight spaces; and craned our necks to breaking in trying
to pierce the gathered gloom in the vaulting overhead. It was a precious
moment, but perhaps too weird, and we were glad to find a sacristan with
businesslike activity setting red candlesticks about a bier in the area
before the choir, which here, as in the other Spanish cathedrals, is
planted frankly in the middle of the edifice, a church by itself, as if
to emphasize the incomparable grandeur of the cathedral. The sacristan
willingly paused in his task and explained that he was preparing the
bier for the funeral of a church dignitary (as we learned later, the
dean) which was to take place the next day at noon; and if we would come
at that hour we should hear some beautiful music. We knew that he
was establishing a claim on our future custom, but we thanked him and
provisionally feed him, and left him at his work, at which we might have
all but fancied him whistling, so cheerfully and briskly he went about
it.

Outside we lingered a moment to give ourselves the solemn joy of the
Chapel of the Constable which forms the apse of the cathedral and is its
chief glory. It mounted to the hard, gray sky, from which a keen wind
was sweeping the narrow street leading to it, and blustering round
the corner of the cathedral, so that the marble men holding up the
Constable’s coat-of-arms in the rear of his chapel might well have ached
from the cold which searched the marrow of flesh-and-blood men below.
These hurried by in flat caps and corduroy coats and trousers, with
sashes at their waists and comforters round their necks; and they were
picturesque quite in the measure of their misery. Some whose tatters
were the most conspicuous feature of their costume, I am sure would have
charmed me if I had been a painter; as a mere word-painter I find myself
wishing I could give the color of their wretchedness to my page.



III


In the absence of any specific record in my notebook I do not know just
how it was between this first glimpse of the cathedral and dinner,
but it must have been on our return to our hotel, that the little
interpreter who had met us at the station, and had been intermittently
constituting himself our protector ever since, convinced us that we
ought to visit the City Hall, and see the outside of the marble tomb
containing the bones of the Cid and his wife. Such as the bones were
we found they were not to be seen themselves, and I do not know that I
should have been the happier for their inspection. In fact, I have no
great opinion of the Cid as an historical character or a poetic fiction.
His epic, or his long ballad, formed no part of my young study in
Spanish, and when four or five years ago a friend gave me a copy of it,
beautifully printed in black letter, with the prayer that I should read
it sometime within the twelvemonth, I found the time far too short. As
a matter of fact I have never read the poem to this day, though. I have
often tried, and I doubt if its author ever intended it to be read. He
intended it rather to be recited in stirring episodes, with spaces for
refreshing slumber in the connecting narrative. As for the Cid in real
life under his proper name of Rodrigo de Vivas, though he made his
king publicly swear that he had had no part in the murder of his royal
brother, and though he was the stoutest and bravest knight in Castile,
I cannot find it altogether admirable in him that when his king banished
him he should resolve to fight thereafter for any master who paid
him best. That appears to me the part of a road-agent rather than a
reformer, and it seems to me no amend for his service under Moorish
princes that he should make war against them on his personal behalf
or afterward under his own ungrateful king. He is friends now with the
Arabian King of Saragossa, and now he defeats the Aragonese under the
Castilian sovereign, and again he sends an insulting message by the
Moslems to the Christian Count of Barcelona, whom he takes prisoner
with his followers, but releases without ransom after a contemptuous
audience. Is it well, I ask, that he helps one Moor against another,
always for what there is in it, and when he takes Valencia from the
infidels, keeps none of his promises to them, but having tortured the
governor to make him give up his treasure, buries him to his waist and
then burns him alive? After that, to be sure, he enjoys his declining
years by making forays in the neighboring country, and dies “satisfied
with having done his duty toward his God.”

Our interpreter, who would not let us rest till he had shown us the
box holding the Cid’s bones, had himself had a varied career. If you
believed him he was born in Madrid and had passed, when three years old,
to New York, where he grew up to become a citizen and be the driver of a
delivery wagon for a large department-store. He duly married an American
woman who could speak not only French, German, and Italian, but also
Chinese, and was now living with him in Burgos. His own English had
somewhat fallen by the way, but what was left he used with great
courage; and he was one of those government interpreters whom you find
at every large station throughout Spain in the number of the principal
hotels of the place. They pay the government a certain tax for
their license, though it was our friend’s expressed belief that the
government, on the contrary, paid him a salary of two dollars a day; but
perhaps this was no better founded than his belief in a German princess
who, when he went as her courier, paid him ten dollars a day and all his
expenses. She wished him to come and live near her in Germany, so as to
be ready to go with her to South America, but he had not yet made up his
mind to leave Burgos, though his poor eyes watered with such a cold as
only Burgos can give a man in the early autumn; when I urged him to look
to the bad cough he had, he pleaded that it was a very old cough. He had
a fascination of his own, which probably came from his imaginative habit
of mind, so that I could have wished more adoptive fellow-citizens were
like him. He sympathized strongly with us in our grief with the cold of
the hotel, and when we said that a small oil-heater would take the chill
off a large room, he said that he had advised that very thing, but that
our host had replied, with proud finality, “I am the landlord.” Whether
this really happened or not, I cannot say, but I have no doubt that our
little guide had some faith in it as a real incident. He apparently had
faith in the landlord’s boast that he was going to have a stately marble
staircase to the public entrance to his hotel, which was presently of
common stone, rather tipsy in its treads, and much in need of scrubbing.

There is as little question in my mind that he believed the carriage we
had engaged to take us next morning to the Cartuja de Miraflores
would be ready at a quarter before nine, and that he may have been
disappointed when it was not ready until a quarter after. But it was
worth waiting for if to have a team composed of a brown mule on the
right hand and a gray horse on the left was to be desired. These animals
which nature had so differenced were equalized by art through the lavish
provision of sleigh-bells, without some strands of which no team in
Spain is properly equipped. Besides, as to his size the mule was quite
as large as the horse, and as to his tail he was much more decorative.
About two inches after this member left his body it was closely shaved
for some six inches or more, and for that space it presented the effect
of a rather large size of garden-hose; below, it swept his thighs in a
lordly switch. If anything could have added distinction to our turnout
it would have been the stiff side-whiskers of our driver: the only pair
I saw in real life after seeing them so long in pictures on boxes of
raisins and cigars. There they were associated with the look and
dress of a _torrero,_ and our coachman, though an old Castilian of the
austerest and most taciturn pattern, may have been in his gay youth an
Andalusian bull-fighter.



IV


Our pride in our equipage soon gave way to our interest in the market
for sheep, cattle, horses, and donkeys which we passed through just
outside the city. The market folk were feeling the morning’s cold;
shepherds folded in their heavy shawls leaned motionless on their long
staves, as if hating to stir; one ingenious boy wore a live lamb round
his neck which he held close by the legs for the greater comfort of it;
under the trees by the roadside some of the peasants were cooking their
breakfasts and warming themselves at the fires. The sun was on duty in
a cloudless sky; but all along the road to the Cartuja we drove between
rows of trees so thickly planted against his summer rage that no ray of
his friendly heat could now reach us. At times it seemed as if from this
remorselessly shaded avenue we should escape into the open; the trees
gave way and we caught glimpses of wide plains and distant hills; then
they closed upon us again, and in their chill shadow it was no comfort
to know that in summer, when the townspeople got through their work,
they came out to these groves, men, women, and children, and had supper
under their hospitable boughs.

One comes to almost any Cartuja at last, and we found ours on a sunny
top just when the cold had pinched us almost beyond endurance, and
joined a sparse group before the closed gate of the convent. The group
was composed of poor people who had come for the dole of food daily
distributed from the convent, and better-to-do country-folk who had
brought things to sell to the monks, or were there on affairs not openly
declared. But it seemed that it was a saint’s day; the monks were having
service in the church solely for their own edification, and they had
shut us sinners out not only by locking the gate, but by taking away the
wire for ringing the bell, and leaving nothing but a knocker of feeble
note with which different members of our indignation meeting vainly
hammered. Our guide assumed the virtue of the greatest indignation,
though he ought to have known that we could not get in on that saint’s
day; but it did not avail, and the little group dispersed, led off by
the brown peasant who was willing to share my pleasure in our excursion
as a good joke on us, and smiled with a show of teeth as white as the
eggs in his basket. After all, it was not wholly a hardship; we could
walk about in the sunny if somewhat muddy open, and warm ourselves
against the icily shaded drive back to town; besides, there was a little
girl crouching at the foot of a tree, and playing at a phase of the
housekeeping which is the game of little girls the world over. Her sad,
still-faced mother standing near, with an interest in her apparently
renewed by my own, said that she was four years old, and joined me
in watching her as she built a pile of little sticks and boiled an
imaginary little kettle over them. I was so glad even of a make-believe
fire that I dropped a copper coin beside it, and the mother smiled
pensively as if grateful but not very hopeful from this beneficence,
though after reflection I had made my gift a “big dog” instead of a
“small dog,” as the Spanish call a ten and a five centimo piece. The
child bent her pretty head shyly on one side, and went on putting more
sticks under her supposititious pot.

I found the little spectacle reward enough in itself and in a sort
compensation for our failure to see the exquisite alabaster tomb of Juan
II. and his wife Isabel which makes the Cartuja Church so famous. There
are a great many beautiful tombs in Burgos, but none so beautiful there
(or in the whole world if the books say true) as this; though we made
what we could of some in the museum, where we saw for the first time in
the recumbent effigies of a husband and wife, with features worn away by
time and incapable of expressing the disappointment, the surprise they
may have felt in the vain effort to warm their feet on the backs of the
little marble angels put there to support them. We made what we could,
too, of the noted Casa de Miranda, the most famous of the palaces in
which the Castilian nobles have long ceased to live at Burgos. There we
satisfied our longing to see a _patio,_ that roofless colonnaded court
which is the most distinctive feature of Spanish domestic architecture,
and more and more distinctively so the farther south you go, till at
Seville you see it in constant prevalence. At Burgos it could never have
been a great comfort, but in this House of Miranda it must have been
a great glory. The spaces between many of the columns have long been
bricked in, but there is fine carving on the front and the vaulting of
the staircase that climbs up from it in neglected grandeur. So many feet
have trodden its steps that they are worn hollow in the middle, and to
keep from falling you must go up next the wall. The object in going up
at all is to join in the gallery an old melancholy custodian in looking
down into the _patio,_ with his cat making her toilet beside him, and to
give them a fee which they receive with equal calm. Then, when you have
come down the age-worn steps without breaking your neck, you have done
the House of Miranda, and may lend yourself with what emotion you choose
to the fact that this ancient seat of hidalgos has now fallen to the low
industry of preparing pigskins to be wine-skins.

[Illustration: 06 THE TOMB OF DONNA MARIA MANUEL]

I do not think that a company of hidalgos in complete medieval armor
could have moved me more strongly than that first sight of these
wine-skins, distended with wine, which we had caught in approaching the
House of Miranda. We had to stop in the narrow street, and let them pass
piled high on a vintner’s wagon, and looking like a load of pork: they
are trimmed and left to keep the shape of the living pig, which they
emulate at its bulkiest, less the head and feet, and seem to roll in
fatness. It was joy to realize what they were, to feel how Spanish, how
literary, how picturesque, how romantic. There they were such as the
wine-skins are that hang from the trees of pleasant groves in many a
merry tale, and invite all swains and shepherds and wandering cavaliers
to tap their bulk and drain its rich plethora. There they were such as
Don Quixote, waking from his dream at the inn, saw them malignant giants
and fell enchanters, and slashed them with his sword till he had spilled
the room half full of their blood. For me this first sight of them was
magic. It brought back my boyhood as nothing else had yet, and I never
afterward saw them without a return to those days of my delight in all
Spanish things.

Literature and its associations, no matter from how lowly suggestion,
must always be first for me, and I still thought of those wine-skins in
yielding to the claims of the cathedral on my wonder and reverence when
now for the second time we came to it. The funeral ceremony of the dean
was still in course, and after listening for a moment to the mighty
orchestral music of it--the deep bass of the priests swelling up with
the organ notes, and suddenly shot with the shrill, sharp trebles of the
choir-boys and pierced with the keen strains of the violins--we left the
cathedral to the solemn old ecclesiastics who sat confronting the bier,
and once more deferred our more detailed and intimate wonder. We went,
in this suspense of emotion, to the famous Convent of Las Huelgas, which
invites noble ladies to its cloistered repose a little beyond the town.
We entered to the convent church through a sort of slovenly court where
a little girl begged severely, almost censoriously, of us, and presently
a cold-faced young priest came and opened the church door. Then we found
the interior of that rank Spanish baroque which escapes somehow the
effeminate effusiveness of the Italian; it does not affect you as
decadent, but as something vigorously perfect in its sort, somberly
authentic, and ripe from a root and not a graft. In its sort, the high
altar, a gigantic triune, with massive twisted columns and swagger
statues of saints and heroes in painted wood, is a prodigy of inventive
piety, and compositely has a noble exaltation in its powerful lift to
the roof.

The nuns came beautifully dressed to hear mass at the grilles giving
into the chapel adjoining the church; the tourist may have his glimpse
of them there on Sundays, and on week-days he may have his guess of
their cloistered life and his wonder how much it continues the tradition
of repose which the name of the old garden grounds implies. These lady
nuns must be of patrician lineage and of fortune enough to defray their
expense in the convent, which is of the courtliest origin, for it was
founded eight hundred years ago by Alfonso VIII. “to expiate his sins
and to gratify his queen,” who probably knew of them. I wish now I had
known, while I was there, that the abbess of Las Huelgas had once had
the power of life and death in the neighborhood, and could hang people
if she liked; I cannot think just what good it would have done me, but
one likes to realize such things on the spot. She is still one of the
greatest ladies of Spain, though perhaps not still “lady of ax and
gibbet,” and her nuns are of like dignity. In their chapel are the tombs
of Alfonso and his queen, whose figures are among those on the high
altar of the church. She was Eleanor Plantagenet, the daughter of our
Henry II., and was very fond of Las Huelgas, as if it were truly a rest
for her in the far-off land of Spain; I say our Henry II., for in the
eleventh century we Americans were still English, under the heel of the
Normans, as not the fiercest republican of us now need shame to own.

In a sense of this historical unity, at Las Huelgas we felt as much at
home as if we had been English tourists, and we had our feudal pride
in the palaces where the Gastilian nobles used to live in Burgos as we
returned to the town. Their deserted seats are mostly to be seen after
you pass through the Moorish gate overarching the stony, dusty, weedy
road hard by the place where the house of the Cid is said to have stood.
The arch, so gracefully Saracenic, was the first monument of the Moslem
obsession of the country which has left its signs so abundantly in the
south; here in the far north the thing seemed almost prehistoric, almost
preglacially old, the witness of a world utterly outdated. But perhaps
it was not more utterly outdated than the residences of the nobles who
had once made the ancient Castilian capital splendid, but were now as
irrevocably merged in Madrid as the Arabs in Africa.



VI


Some of the palaces looked down from the narrow street along the
hillside above the cathedral, but only one of them was kept up in the
state of other days; and I could not be sure at what point this street
had ceased to be the street where our guide said every one kept cows,
and the ladies took big pitchers of milk away to sell every morning.
But I am sure those ladies could have been of noble descent only in
the farthest possible remove, and I do not suppose their cows were even
remotely related to the haughty ox-team which blocked the way in front
of the palaces and obliged xis to dismount while our carriage was lifted
round the cart. Our driver was coldly disgusted, but the driver of
the ox-team preserved a calm as perfect as if he had been an hidalgo
interested by the incident before his gate. It delayed us till the
psychological moment when the funeral of the dean was over, and we could
join the formidable party following the sacristan from chapel to chapel
in the cathedral.

We came to an agonized consciousness of the misery of this progress in
the Chapel of the Constable, where it threatened to be finally stayed
by the indecision of certain ladies of our nation in choosing among the
postal cards for sale there. By this time we had suffered much from the
wonders of the cathedral. The sacristan had not spared us a jewel or
a silvered or gilded sacerdotal garment or any precious vessel of
ceremonial, so that our jaded wonder was inadequate to the demand of the
beautiful tombs of the Constable and his lady upon it. The coffer of
the Cid, fastened against the cathedral wall for a monument of his
shrewdness in doing the Jews of Burgos, who, with the characteristic
simplicity of their race, received it back full of sand and gravel in
payment of the gold they had lent him in it, could as little move us.
Perhaps if we could have believed that he finally did return the value
received, we might have marveled a little at it, but from what we knew
of the Cid this was not credible. We did what we could with the painted
wood carving of the cloister doors; the life-size head of a man with
its open mouth for a key-hole in another portal; a fearful silver-plated
chariot given by a rich blind woman for bearing the Host in the
procession of Corpus Christi; but it was very little, and I am not
going to share my failure with the reader by the vain rehearsal of
its details. No literary art has ever reported a sense of picture or
architecture or sculpture to me: the despised postal card is better for
that; and probably throughout these “trivial fond records” I shall be
found shirking as much as I may the details of such sights, seen or
unseen, as embitter the heart of travel with unavailing regret for the
impossibility of remembering them. I must leave for some visit of the
reader’s own the large and little facts of the many chapels in the
cathedral at Burgos, and I will try to overwhelm him with my sense of
the whole mighty interior, the rich gloom, the Gothic exaltation,
which I made such shift as I could to feel in the company of those
picture-postal amateurs. It was like, say, a somber afternoon, verging
to the twilight of a cloudy sunset, so that when I came out of it into
the open noon it was like emerging into a clear morrow. Perhaps because
I could there shed the harassing human environment the outside of the
cathedral seemed to me the best of it, and we lingered there for a
moment in glad relief.



VII

[Illustration: 07 A BURGOS STREET]

One house in some forgotten square commemorates the state in which
the Castilian nobles used to live in Burgos before Toledo, and then
Valladolid, contested the primacy of the grim old capital of the
northern uplands. We stayed for a moment to glance from our carriage
through the open portal into its leafy _patio_ shivering in the cold,
and then we bade our guide hurry back with us to the hot luncheon which
would be the only heat in our hotel. But to reach this we had to pass
through another square, which we found full of peasants’ ox-carts and
mule-teams; and there our guide instantly jumped down and entered into
a livelier quarrel with those peaceable men and women than I could
afterward have believed possible in Spain. I bade him get back to his
seat beside the driver, who was abetting him with an occasional guttural
and whom I bade turn round and go another way. I said that I had hired
this turnout, and I was master, and I would be obeyed; but it seemed
that I was wrong. My proud hirelings never left off their dispute
till somehow the ox-carts and mule-teams were jammed together, and a
thoroughfare found for us. Then it was explained that those peasants
were always blocking that square in that way and that I had, however
unwillingly, been discharging the duty of a public-spirited citizen in
compelling them to give way. I did not care for that; I prized far more
the quiet with which they had taken the whole affair. It was the first
exhibition of the national repose of manner which we were to see so
often again, south as well as north, and which I find it so beautiful to
have seen. In a Europe abounding in volcanic Italians, nervous Germans,
and exasperated Frenchmen, it was comforting, it was edifying to see
those Castilian peasants so self-respectfully self-possessed in the
wrong.

From time to time in the opener spaces we had got into the sun from the
chill shadow of the narrow streets, but now it began to be cloudy, and
when we re-entered our hotel it was almost as warm indoors as out. We
thought our landlord might have so far repented as to put on the steam;
but he had sternly adhered to his principle that the radiators were
enough of themselves; and after luncheon we had nothing for it but to
go away from Burgos, and take with us such scraps of impression as we
could. We decided that there was no street of gayer shops than those
gloomy ones we had chanced into here and there; I do not remember now
anything like a bookseller’s or a milliner’s or a draper’s window. There
was no sign of fashion among the ladies of Burgos, so far as we could
distinguish them; there was not a glowering or perking hat, and I do not
believe there was a hobble-skirt in all the austere old capital except
such as some tourist wore; the black lace mantillas and the flowing
garments of other periods flitted by through the chill alleys and into
the dim doorways. The only cheerfulness in the local color was to be
noted in the caparison of the donkeys, which we were to find more and
more brilliant southward. Do I say the only cheerfulness? I ought to
except also the involuntary hilarity of a certain poor man’s suit which
was so patched together of myriad scraps that it looked as if cut from
the fabric of a crazy-quilt. I owe him this notice the rather because he
almost alone did not beg of us in a city which swarmed with beggars in
a forecast of that pest of beggary which infests Spain everywhere. I do
not say that the thing is without picturesqueness, without real pathos;
the little girl who kissed the copper I gave her in the cathedral
remains endeared to me by that perhaps conventional touch of poetry.

There was compensation for the want of presence among the ladies of
Burgos, in the leading lady of the theatrical company who dined, the
night before, at our hotel with the chief actors of her support, before
giving a last performance in our ancient city. It happened another time
in our Spanish progress that we had the society of strolling players at
our hotel, and it was both times told us that the given company was the
best dramatic company in Spain; but at Burgos we did not yet know that
we were so singularly honored. The leading lady there had luminous black
eyes, large like the head-lamps of a motor-car, and a wide crimson mouth
which she employed as at a stage banquet throughout the dinner,
while she talked and laughed with her fellow-actors, beautiful as
bull-fighters, cleanshaven, serious of face and shapely of limb. They
were unaffectedly professional, and the lady made no pretense of not
being a leading lady. One could see that she was the kindest creature in
the world, and that she took a genuine pleasure in her huge, practicable
eyes. At the other end of the room a Spanish family--father, mother,
and small children, down to some in arms--were dining and the children
wailing as Spanish children will, regardless of time and place; and when
the nurse brought one of the disconsolate infants to be kissed by
the leading lady one’s heart went out to her for the amiability and
abundance of her caresses. The mere sight of their warmth did something
to supply the defect of steam in the steam-heating apparatus, but when
one got beyond their radius there was nothing for the shivering traveler
except to wrap himself in the down quilt of his bed and spread his
steamer-rug over his knees till it was time to creep under both of them
between the glacial sheets.

We were sorry we had not got tickets for the leading lady’s public
performance; it could have been so little more public; but we had not,
and there was nothing else in Burgos to invite the foot outdoors
after dinner. From my own knowledge I cannot yet say the place was not
lighted; but my sense of the tangle of streets lying night long in a
rich Gothic gloom shall remain unimpaired by statistics. Very possibly
Burgos is brilliantly lighted with electricity; only they have not got
the electricity on, as in our steam-heated hotel they had not got the
steam on.



VIII


We had authorized our little interpreter to engage tickets for us by the
mail-train the next afternoon for Valladolid; he pretended, of course,
that the places could be had only by his special intervention, and by
telegraphing for them to the arriving train. We accepted his romantic
theory of the case, and paid the bonus due the railroad agent in the
hotel for his offices in the matter; we would have given anything, we
were so eager to get out of Burgos before we were frozen up there. I
do not know that we were either surprised or pained to find that our
Chilian friends should have got seats in the same car without anything
of our diplomacy, by the simple process of showing their tickets. I
think our little interpreter was worth everything he cost, and more. I
would not have lost a moment of his company as he stood on the platform
with me, adding one artless invention to another for my pleasure, and
successively extracting peseta after peseta from me till he had made
up the sum which he had doubtless idealized as a just reward for his
half-day’s service when he first told me that it should be what I
pleased. We parted with the affection of fellow-citizens in a strange
monarchical country, his English growing less and less as the
train delayed, and his eyes watering more and more as with tears of
com-patriotic affection. At the moment I could have envied that German
princess her ability to make sure of his future companionship at the
low cost of fifty pesetas a day; and even now, when my affection has had
time to wane, I cannot do less than commend him to any future visitor
at Burgos, as in the last degree amiable, and abounding in surprises of
intelligence and unexpected feats of reliability.




IV. THE VARIETY OF VALLADOLID


When you leave Burgos at 3.29 of a passably sunny afternoon you are not
at once aware of the moral difference between the terms of your approach
and those of your departure. You are not changing your earth or your
sky very much, but it is not long before you are sensible of a change of
mind which insists more and more. There is the same long ground-swell
of wheat-fields, but yesterday you were followed in vision by the
loveliness of the frugal and fertile Biscayan farms, and to-day this
vision has left you, and you are running farther and farther into the
economic and topographic waste of Castile. Yesterday there were more
or less agreeable shepherdesses in pleasant plaids scattered over the
landscape; to-day there are only shepherds of three days’ unshornness;
the plaids are ragged, and there is not sufficient compensation in
the cavalcades of both men and women riding donkeys in and out of the
horizons on the long roads that lose and find themselves there. Flocks
of brown and black goats, looking large as cows among the sparse
stubble, do little to relieve the scene from desolation; I am not sure
but goats, when brown and black, add to the horror of a desolate scene.
There are no longer any white farmsteads, or friendly villages gathering
about high-shouldered churches, but very far away to the eastward or
westward the dun expanse of the wheat-lands is roughed with something
which seems a cluster of muddy protuberances, so like the soil at first
it is not distinguishable from it, but which as your train passes
nearer proves to be a town at the base of tablelands, without a tree
or a leaf or any spear of green to endear it to the eye as the abode of
living men. You pull yourself together in the effort to visualize the
immeasurable fields washing those dreary towns with golden tides of
harvest; but it is difficult. What you cannot help seeing is the actual
nakedness of the land which with its spindling stubble makes you think
of that awful moment of the human head, when utter baldness will be a
relief to the spectator.



I


At times and in places, peasants were scratching the dismal surfaces
with the sort of plows which Abel must have used, when subsoiling was
not yet even a dream; and between the plowmen and their ox-teams it
seemed a question as to which should loiter longest in the unfinished
furrow. Now and then, the rush of the train gave a motionless goatherd,
with his gaunt flock, an effect of comparative celerity to the rearward.
The women riding their donkeys over

  The level waste, the rounding gray

in the distance were the only women we saw except those who seemed to
be keeping the stations, and one very fat one who came to the train at
a small town and gabbled volubly to some passenger who made no audible
response. She excited herself, but failed to rouse the interest of the
other party to the interview, who remained unseen as well as unheard. I
could the more have wished to know what it was all about because nothing
happened on board the train to distract the mind from the joyless
landscape until we drew near Valladolid. It is true that for a while
we shared our compartment with a father and his two sons who lunched on
slices of the sausage which seems the favorite refection of the Latin as
well as the Germanic races in their travels. But this drama was not
of intense interest, and we grappled in vain with the question of our
companions’ social standard. The father, while he munched his bread
and sausage, read a newspaper which did not rank him or even define
his politics; there was a want of fashion in the cut of the young men’s
clothes and of freshness in the polish of their tan shoes which
defied conjecture. When they left the train without the formalities
of leave-taking which had hitherto distinguished our Spanish
fellow-travelers, we willingly abandoned them to a sort of middling
obscurity; but this may not really have been their origin or their
destiny.

That spindling sparseness, worse than utter baldness, of the wheat
stubble now disappeared with cinematic suddenness, and our train was
running past stretches of vineyard, where, among the green and purple
and yellow ranks, the vintagers, with their donkeys and carts, were
gathering the grapes in the paling light of the afternoon. Again the
scene lacked the charm of woman’s presence which the vintage had in
southern France. In Spain we nowhere saw the women sharing the outdoor
work of the men; and we fancied their absence the effect of the Oriental
jealousy lingering from centuries of Moorish domination; though we could
not entirely reconcile our theory with the publicity of their washing
clothes at every stream. To be sure, that was work which they did not
share with men any more than the men shared the labor of the fields with
them.

It was still afternoon, well before sunset, when we arrived at
Valladolid, where one of the quaintest of our Spanish surprises awaited
us. We knew that the omnibus of the hotel we had chosen would be the
shabbiest omnibus at the station, and we saw without great alarm our
Chilian friends drive off in an indefinitely finer vehicle. But what we
were not prepared for was the fact of _octroi_ at Valladolid, and for
the strange behavior of the local customs officer who stopped us on our
way into the town. He looked a very amiable young man as he put his face
in at the omnibus door, and he received without explicit question our
declaration that we had nothing taxable in our trunks. Then, however, he
mounted to the top of the omnibus and thumped our trunks about as if to
test them for contraband by the sound. The investigation continued on
these strange terms until the officer had satisfied himself of our good
faith, when he got down and with a friendly smile at the window bowed us
into Valladolid.

In its way nothing could have been more charming; and we rather liked
being left by the omnibus about a block from our hotel, on the border of
a sort of promenade where no vehicles were allowed. We had been halted
near a public fountain, where already the mothers and daughters of the
neighborhood were gathered with earthen jars for the night’s supply of
water. The jars were not so large as to overburden any of them when,
after just delay for exchange of gossip, the girls and goodwives put
them on their heads and marched erectly away with them, each beautifully
picturesque irrespective of her age or looks.

The air was soft, and after Burgos, warm; something southern, unfelt
before, began to qualify the whole scene, which as the evening fell grew
more dramatic, and made the promenade the theater of emotions permitted
such unrestricted play nowhere else in Spain, so far as we were witness.
On one side the place was arcaded, and bordered with little shops, not
so obtrusively brilliant that the young people who walked up and down
before them were in a glare of publicity. A little way off the avenue
expanded into a fine oblong place, where some first martyrs of the
Inquisition were burned. But the promenades kept well short of this,
as they walked up and down, and talked, talked, talked in that
inexhaustible interest which youth takes in itself the world over. They
were in the standard proportion of two girls to one young man, or, if
here and there a girl had an undivided young man to herself, she went
before some older maiden or matron whom she left altogether out of the
conversation. They mostly wore the skirts and hats of Paris, and if the
scene of the fountain was Arabically oriental the promenade was almost
Americanly occidental. The promenaders were there by hundreds; they
filled the avenue from side to side, and

  The delight of happy laughter
  The delight of low replies

that rose from their progress, with the chirp and whisper of their
feet cheered the night as long as we watched and listened from the sun
balcony of our hotel.



II


There was no more heat in the radiators of the hotel there than at
Burgos, but for that evening at least there was none needed. It was the
principal hotel of Valladolid, and the unscrubbed and unswept staircase
by which we mounted into it was merely a phase of that genial pause, as
for second thought, in the march of progress which marks so much of the
modern advance in Spain, and was by no means an evidence of arrested
development. We had the choice of reaching our rooms either through the
dining-room or by a circuitous detour past the pantries; but our rooms
had a proud little vestibule of their own, with a balcony over the great
square, and if one of them had a belated feather-bed the other had a
new hair mattress, and the whole house was brilliantly lighted with
electricity. As for the cooking, it was delicious, and the table was
of an abundance and variety which might well have made one ashamed of
paying so small a rate as two dollars a day for bed and board, wine
included, and very fair wine at that.

In Spain you must take the bad with the good, for whether you get the
good or not you are sure of the bad, but only very exceptionally are you
sure of the bad only. It was a pleasure not easily definable to find our
hotel managed by a mother and two daughters, who gave the orders
obeyed by the men-servants, and did not rebuke them for joining in
the assurance that when we got used to going so abruptly from the
dining-room into our bedrooms we would like it. The elder of the
daughters had some useful French, and neither of the younger ladies ever
stayed for some ultimate details of dishabille in coming to interpret
the mother and ourselves to one another when we encountered her alone
in the office. They were all thoroughly kind and nice, and they were
supported with surpassing intelligence and ability by the _chico,_
a radiant boy of ten, who united in himself the functions which the
amiable inefficiency of the porters and waiters abandoned to him.

When we came out to dinner after settling ourselves in our almost
obtrusively accessible rooms, we were convinced of the wisdom of our
choice of a hotel by finding our dear Chilians at one of the tables. We
rushed together like two kindred streams of transatlantic gaiety, and
in our mingled French, Spanish, and English possessed one another of our
doubts and fears in coming to our common conclusion. We had already seen
a Spanish gentleman whom we knew as a fellow-sufferer at Burgos, roaming
the streets of Valladolid, and in what seemed a disconsolate doubt,
interrogating the windows of our hotel; and now we learned from the
Chilians that he had been bitterly disappointed in the inn which a
patrician omnibus had borne him away to from our envious eyes at the
station. We learned that our South American compatriots had found
their own chosen hotel impossible, and were now lodged in rapturous
satisfaction under our roof. Their happiness penetrated us with a glow
of equal content, and confirmed us in the resolution always to take the
worst omnibus at a Spanish station as the sure index of the best hotel.

The street-cars, which in Valladolid are poetically propelled through
lyre-shaped trolleys instead of our prosaic broomstick appliances,
groaned unheeded if not unheard under our windows through the night, and
we woke to find the sun on duty in our glazed balcony and the promenade
below already astir with life: not the exuberant young life of the
night before, but still sufficiently awake to be recognizable as life. A
crippled newsboy seated under one of the arcades was crying his papers;
an Englishman was looking at a plan of Valladolid in a shop window; a
splendid cavalry officer went by in braided uniform, and did not stare
so hard as they might have expected at some ladies passing in mantillas
to mass or market. In the late afternoon as well as the early morning
we saw a good deal of the military in Valladolid, where an army corps is
stationed. From time to time a company of infantry marched through the
streets to gay music, and toward evening slim young officers began to
frequent the arcades and glass themselves in the windows of the shops,
their spurs clinking on the pavement as they lounged by or stopped and
took distinguished attitudes. We speculated in vain as to their social
quality, and to this day I do not know whether “the career is open to
the talents” in the Spanish army, or whether military rank is merely
the just reward of civil rank. Those beautiful young swells in
riding-breeches and tight gray jackets approached an Italian type
of cavalry officer; they did not look very vigorous, and the common
soldiers we saw marching through the streets, largely followed by the
populace, were not of formidable stature or figure, though neat and
agreeable enough to the eye.

While I indulge the record of these trivialities, which I am by no means
sure the reader will care for so much, I feel that it would be wrong to
let him remain as ignorant of the history of Valladolid as I was while
there. My ignorance was not altogether my fault; I had fancied easily
finding at some bookseller’s under the arcade a little sketch of the
local history such as you are sure of finding in any Italian town, done
by a local antiquary of those always mousing in the city’s archives.
But the bookseller’s boy and then the boy’s mother could not at first
imagine my wish, and when they did they could only supply me with a sort
of business directory, full of addresses and advertisements. So instead
of overflowing with information when we set out on our morning ramble,
we meagerly knew from the guide-books that Valladolid had once been the
capital of Castile, arid after many generations of depression following
the removal of the court, had in these latest days renewed its strength
in mercantile and industrial prosperity. There are ugly evidences of the
prosperity in the windy, dusty avenues and streets of the more modern
town; but there are lanes and alleys enough, groping for the churches
and monuments in suddenly opening squares, to console the sentimental
tourist for the havoc which enterprise has made. The mind readily goes
back through these to the palmy prehistoric times from which the town
emerged to mention in Ptolemy, and then begins to work forward past
Iberian and Roman and Goth and Moor to the Castilian kings who made it
their residence in the eleventh century. The capital won its first
great distinction when Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile were
married there in 1469. Thirty-five years later these Catholic Kings,
as one had better learn at once to call them in Spain, let Columbus die
neglected if not forgotten in the house recently pulled down, where he
had come to dwell in their cold shadow; they were much occupied with
other things and they could not realize that his discovery of America
was the great glory of their reign; probably they thought the conquest
of Granada was. Later yet, by twenty years, the dreadful Philip II.
was born in Valladolid, and in 1559 a very famous _auto da fe_ wag
celebrated in the Plaza Mayor. Fourteen Lutherans were burned alive for
their heresy, and the body of a woman suspected of imperfect orthodoxy
after her death was exhumed and burned with them. In spite of such
precautions as these, and of all the pious diligence of the Holy Office,
the reader will hardly believe that there is now a Spanish Protestant
church in Valladolid; but such is the fact, though whether it derives
from the times of the Inquisition, or is a modern missionary church I
do not know. That _auto da fe_ was of the greatest possible distinction;
the Infanta Juana presided, and the universal interest was so great that
people paid a dollar and twenty-five cents a seat; money then worth five
or six times as much as now. Philip himself came to another _auto_ when
thirteen persons were burned in the same place, and he always liked
Valladolid; it must have pleased him in a different way from Escorial,
lying flat as it does on a bare plain swept, but never thoroughly
dusted, by winds that blow pretty constantly over it.

While the Inquisition was purging the city of error its great university
was renowning it not only throughout Spain, but in France and Italy;
students frequented it from those countries, and artists came from many
parts of Europe. Literature also came in the person of Cervantes,
who seems to have followed the Spanish court in its migrations from
Valladolid to Toledo and then to Madrid. Here also came one of the
greatest characters in fiction, for it was in Valladolid that Gil Blas
learned to practise the art of medicine tinder the instruction of the
famous Dr. Sangrado.



IV

[Illustration: 08 A STREET LEADING TO THE CATHEDRAL]

I put these facts at the service of the reader for what use he will
while he goes with us to visit the cathedral in Valladolid, a cathedral
as unlike that of Burgos as the severest mood of Spanish renaissance can
render it. In fact, it is the work of Herrera, the architect who made
the Escorial so grim, and is the expression in large measure of his
austere mastery. If it had ever been finished it might have been quite
as dispiriting as the Escorial, but as it has only one of the
four ponderous towers it was meant to have, it is not without its
alleviations, especially as the actual tower was rebuilt after the fall
of the original seventy years ago. The grass springs cheerfully up in
the crevices of the flagging from which the broken steps falter to the
portal, but within all is firm and solid. The interior is vast, and
nowhere softened by decoration, but the space is reduced by the huge
bulk of the choir in the center of it; as we entered a fine echo mounted
to the cathedral roof from the chanting and intoning within. When
the service ended a tall figure in scarlet crossed rapidly toward the
sacristy. It was of such imposing presence that we resolved at once it
must be the figure of a cardinal, or of an archbishop at the least. But
it proved to be one of the sacristans, and when we followed him to
the sacristy with half a dozen other sightseers, he showed us a silver
monstrance weighing a hundred and fifty pounds and decked with statites
of our first parents as they appeared before the Fall. Besides this we
saw, much against our will, a great many ecclesiastical vestments
of silk and damask richly wrought in gold and silver. But if we were
reluctant there was a little fat priest there who must have seen them
hundreds of times and had still a childish delight in seeing them again
because he had seen them so often; he dimpled and smiled, and for his
sake we pretended a joy in them which it would have been cruel to deny
him. I suppose we were then led to the sacrifice at the several side
altars, but I have no specific recollection of them; I know there was a
pale, sick-looking young girl in white who went about with her father,
and moved compassion by her gentle sorrowfulness.

Of the University, which we visited next, I recall only the baroque
facade; the interior was in reparation and I do not know whether it
would have indemnified us for not visiting the University of Salamanca.
That was in our list, but the perversity of the time-table forbade. You
could go to Salamanca, yes, but you could not come back except at two
o’clock in the morning; you could indeed continue on to Lisbon, but
perhaps you did not wish to see Lisbon. A like perversity of the
time-table, once universal in Spain, but now much reformed, also kept
us away from Segovia, which was on our list. But our knowledge of it
enabled us to tell a fellow-countrywoman whom we presently met in the
museum of the University, how she could best, or worst, get to that
city. Our speech gave us away to her, and she turned to us from the
other objects of interest to explain first that she was in a hotel where
she paid only six pesetas a day, but where she could get no English
explanation of the time-table for any money. She had come to Valladolid
with a friend who was going next day to Salamanca, but next day was
Sunday and she did not like to travel on Sunday, and Segovia seemed the
only alternative. We could not make out why, or if it came to that
why she should be traveling alone through Spain with such a slender
equipment of motive or object, but we perceived she was one of the
most estimable souls in the world, and if she cared more for getting
to Segovia that afternoon than for looking at the wonders of the place
where we were, we could not blame her. We had to leave her when we left
the museum in the charge of two custodians who led her, involuntary but
unresisting, to an upper chamber where there were some pictures
which she could care no more for than for the wood carvings below. We
ourselves cared so little for those pictures that we would not go to see
them. Pictures you can see anywhere, but not statuary of such singular
interest, such transcendant powerfulness as those carvings of Berruguete
and other masters less known, which held us fascinated in the lower
rooms of the museum. They are the spoil of convents in the region about,
suppressed by the government at different times, and collected here with
little relevancy to their original appeal. Some are Scriptural subjects
and some are figures of the dancers who take part in certain ceremonials
of the Spanish churches (notably the cathedral at Seville), which have a
quaint reality, an intense personal character. They are of a fascination
which I can hope to convey by no phrase of mine; but far beyond this is
the motionless force, the tremendous repose of the figures of the Roman
soldiers taken in the part of sleeping at the Tomb. These sculptures are
in wood, life-size, and painted in the colors of flesh and costume, with
every detail and of a strong mass in which the detail is lost and must
be found again by the wondering eye. Beyond all other Spanish sculptures
they seemed to me expressive of the national temperament; I thought no
other race could have produced them, and that in their return to
the Greek ideal of color in statuary they were ingenuously frank and
unsurpassably bold.

It might have been the exhaustion experienced from the encounter with
their strenuousness that suddenly fatigued us past even the thought of
doing any more of Valladolid on foot. At any rate, when we came out of
the museum we took refuge in a corner grocery (it seems the nature of
groceries to seek corners the world over) and asked the grocer where we
could find a cab.

[Illustration: 09 THE UNIVERSITY OF VALLADOLID]

The grocer was young and kind, and not so busy but he could give willing
attention to our case. He said he would send for a cab, and he called
up from his hands and knees a beautiful blond half-grown boy who was
scrubbing the floor, and despatched him on this errand, first making him
wipe the suds off his hands. The boy was back wonderfully soon to
say the cab would come for us in ten minutes, and to receive with
self-respectful appreciation the peseta which rewarded his promptness.
In the mean time we feigned a small need which we satisfied by a
purchase, and then the grocer put us chairs in front of his counter and
made us his guests while his other customers came and went. They came
oftener than they went, for our interest in them did not surpass their
interest in us. We felt that through this we reflected credit upon
our amiable host; rumors of the mysterious strangers apparently spread
through the neighborhood and the room was soon filled with people
who did not all come to buy; but those who did buy were the most,
interesting. An elderly man with his wife bought a large bottle which
the grocer put into one scale of his balance, and poured its weight
in chick-peas into the other. Then he filled the bottle with oil and
weighed it, and then he gave the peas along with it to his customers.
It seemed a pretty convention, though we could not quite make out its
meaning, unless the peas were bestowed as a sort of bonus; but the
next convention was clearer to us. An old man in black corduroy with a
clean-shaven face and a rather fierce, retired bull-fighter air, bought
a whole dried stock-fish (which the Spaniards eat instead of salt cod)
talking loudly to the grocer and at us while the grocer cut it across in
widths of two inches and folded it into a neat pocketful; then a glass
of wine was poured from a cask behind the counter, and the customer
drank it off in honor of the transaction with the effect also of
pledging us with his keen eyes; all the time he talked, and he was
joined in conversation by a very fat woman who studied us not unkindly.
Other neighbors who had gathered in had no apparent purpose but to
verify our outlandish presence and to hear my occasional Spanish, which
was worth hearing if for nothing but the effort it cost me. The grocer
accepted with dignity the popularity we had won him, and when at last
our cab arrived from Mount Ararat with the mire of the subsiding Deluge
encrusted upon it he led us out to it through the small boys who swarmed
upon us wherever we stopped or started in Valladolid; and whose bulk was
now much increased by the coming of that very fat woman from within the
grocery. As the morning was bright we proposed having the top opened,
but here still another convention of the place intervened. In Valladolid
it seems that no self-respecting cabman will open the top of his cab
for an hour’s drive, and we could not promise to keep ours longer. The
grocer waited the result of our parley, and then he opened our carriage
door and bowed us away. It was charming; if he had a place on Sixth
Avenue I would be his customer as long as I lived in New York; and to
this moment I do not understand why I did not bargain with that blond
boy to come to America with us and be with us always. But there was no
city I visited in Spain where I was not sorry to leave some boy behind
with the immense rabble of boys whom I hoped never to see again.



VI


After this passage of real life it was not easy to sink again to the
level of art, but if we must come down it there could have been no
descent less jarring than that which left us in the exquisite _patio_
of the College of San Gregorio, founded for poor students of theology in
the time of the Catholic Kings. The students who now thronged the place
inside and out looked neither clerical nor poverty-stricken; but I dare
say they were good Christians, and whatever their condition they were
rich in the constant vision of beauty which one sight of seemed to us
more than we merited. Perhaps the facade of the college and that of the
neighboring Church of San Pablo may be elsewhere surpassed in the sort
of sumptuous delicacy of that Gothic which gets its name of plateresque
from the silversmithing spirit of its designs; but I doubt it. The
wonderfulness of it is that it is not mechanical or monotonous like
the stucco fretting of the Moorish decoration which people rave over
in Spain, but has a strength in its refinement which comes from its
expression in the exquisitely carven marble. When this is grayed with
age it is indeed of the effect of old silver work; but the plateresque
in Valladolid does not suggest fragility or triviality; its grace is
perhaps rather feminine than masculine; but at the worst it is only the
ultimation of the decorative genius of the Gothic. It is, at any rate,
the finest surprise which the local architecture has to offer and it
leaves one wishing for more rather than less of it, so that after the
facade of San Gregorio one is glad of it again in the walls of the
_patio,_ whose staircases and galleries, with the painted wooden beams
of their ceilings, scarcely tempt the eye from it.

We thought the front of San Pablo deserved a second visit, and we were
rewarded by finding it far lovelier than we thought. The church was
open, and when we went in we had the advantage of seeing a large
silver-gilt car moved from the high altar down the nave to a side altar
next the door, probably for use in some public procession. The tongue
of the car was pulled by a man with one leg; a half-grown boy under the
body of it hoisted it on his back and eased it along; and a monk with
his white robe tucked up into his girdle pushed it powerfully from
behind. I did not make out why so strange a team should have been
employed for the work, but the spectacle of that quaint progress was
unique among my experiences at Valladolid and of a value which I wish I
could make the reader feel with me. We ourselves were so interested in
the event that we took part in it so far as to push aside a bench that
blocked the way, and we received a grateful smile from the monk in
reward of our zeal.

We were in the mood for simple kindness because of our stiff official
reception at the Royal Palace, which we visited in the gratification
of our passion for _patios._ It is now used for provincial or municipal
offices and guarded by sentries who indeed admitted us to the courtyard,
but would not understand our wish (it was not very articulately
expressed) to mount to the cloistered galleries which all the
guide-books united in pronouncing so noble, with their decorative busts
of the Roman Emperors and arms of the Spanish provinces. The sculptures
are by the school of Berruguete, for whom we had formed so strong
a taste at the museum; but our disappointment was not at the moment
further embittered by knowing that Napoleon resided there in 1809. We
made what we could of other _patios_ in the vicinity, especially of one
in the palace across from San Gregorio, to which the liveried porter
welcomed us, though the noble family was in residence, and allowed us to
mount the red-carpeted staircase to a closed portal in consideration of
the peseta which he correctly foresaw. It was not a very characteristic
_patio,_ bare of flower and fountain as it was, and others more fully
appointed did not entirely satisfy us. The fact is the _patio_ is to be
seen best in Andalusia, its home, where every house is built round it,
and in summer cooled and in winter chilled by it. But if we were not
willing to wait for Seville, Valladolid did what it could; and if we saw
no house with quite the _patio_ we expected we did see the house where
Philip II. was born, unless the enterprising boy who led us to it was
mistaken; in that case we were, Ophelia-like, the more deceived.



VII

[Illustration: 10 CHURCH OF SAN PABLO]

Such things do not really matter; the guide-book’s object of interest is
seldom an object of human interest; you may miss it or ignore it without
real personal loss; but if we had failed of that mystic progress of the
silver car down the nave of San Pablo we should have been really if
not sensibly poorer. So we should if we had failed of the charming
experience which awaited us in our hotel at lunch-time. When we went out
in the morning we saw a table spread the length of the long dining-room,
and now when we returned we found every chair taken. At once we surmised
a wedding breakfast, not more from the gaiety than the gravity of the
guests; and the head waiter confirmed our impression: it was indeed a
_boda._ The party was just breaking up, and as we sat down at our table
the wedding guests rose from theirs. I do not know but in any country
the women on such an occasion would look more adequate to it than the
men; at any rate, there in Spain they looked altogether superior. It
was not only that they were handsomer and better dressed, but that they
expressed finer social and intellectual quality.

All the faces had the quiet which the Spanish face has in such degree
that the quiet seems national more than personal; but the women’s faces
were oval, though rather heavily based, while the men’s were squared,
with high cheek-bones, and they seemed more distinctly middle class. Men
and women had equally repose of manner, and when the women came to put
on their headgear near our corner, it was with a surface calm unbroken
by what must have been their inner excitement. They wore hats and
mantillas in about the same proportion; but the bride wore a black
mantilla and a black dress with sprigs of orange blossoms in her hair
and on her breast for the only note of white. Her lovely, gentle face
was white, of course, from the universal powder, and so were the faces
of the others, who talked in low tones around her, with scarcely more
animation than so many masks. The handsomest of them, whom we decided
to be her sister, arranged the bride’s mantilla, and was then helped on
with hers by the others, with soft smiles and glances. Two little girls,
imaginably sorry the feast was over, suppressed their regret in the
tutelage of the maiden aunts and grandmothers who put up cakes in
napkins to carry home; and then the party vanished in unbroken decorum.
When they were gone we found that in studying the behavior of the bride
and her friends we had not only failed to identify the bridegroom, but
had altogether forgotten to try.



VIII


The terrible Torquemada dwelt for years in Valla-dolid and must there
have excogitated some of the methods of the Holy Office in dealing with
heresy. As I have noted, Ferdinand and Isabella were married there and
Philip II. was born there; but I think the reader will agree with me
that the highest honor of the city is that it was long the home of the
gallant gentleman who after five years of captivity in Algiers and the
loss of his hand in the Battle of Lepanto, wrote there, in his poverty
and neglect, the first part of a romance which remains and must always
remain one of the first if not the very first of the fictions of the
world. I mean that

  Dear son of memory, great heir of fame,

Michael Cervantes; and I wish I could pay here that devoir to his memory
and fame which squalid circumstance forbade me to render under the roof
that once sheltered him. One can never say enough in his praise, and
even Valladolid seems to have thought so, for the city has put up a
tablet to him with his bust above it in the front of his incredible
house and done him the homage of a reverent inscription. It is a very
little house, as small as Ariosto’s in Ferrara, which he said was so apt
for him, but it is not in a long, clean street like that; it is in a bad
neighborhood which has not yet outlived the evil repute it bore in the
days of Cervantes. It was then the scene of nightly brawls and in one of
these a gentleman was stabbed near the author’s house. The alarm brought
Cervantes to the door and being the first to reach the dying man he
was promptly arrested, together with his wife, his two sisters, and his
niece, who were living with him and who were taken up as accessories
before the fact. The whole abomination is matter of judicial record,
and it appears from this that suspicion fell upon the gentle family (one
sister was a nun) because they were living in that infamous place. The
man whose renown has since filled the civilized world fuller even than
the name of his contemporary, Shakespeare (they died on the same day),
was then so unknown to the authorities of Valladolid that he had great
ado to establish the innocence of himself and his household. To be
sure, his _Don Quixote_ had not yet appeared, though he is said to have
finished the first part in that miserable abode in that vile region;
but he had written poems and plays, especially his most noble tragedy
of “Numancia,” and he had held public employs and lived near enough to
courts to be at least in their cold shade. It is all very Spanish
and very strange, and perhaps the wonder should be that in this most
provincial of royal capitals, in a time devoted to the extirpation of
ideas, the fact that he was a poet and a scholar did not tell fatally
against him. In his declaration before the magistrates he says that
his literary reputation procured him the acquaintance of courtiers and
scholars, who visited him in that pitiable abode where the ladies of his
family cared for themselves and him with the help of one servant maid.

They had an upper floor of the house, which stands at the base of a
stone terrace dropping from the wide, dusty, fly-blown street, where I
stayed long enough to buy a melon (I was always buying a melon in Spain)
and put it into my cab before I descended the terrace to revere the
house of Cervantes on its own level. There was no mistaking it; there
was the bust and the inscription; but it was well I bought my melon
before I ventured upon this act of piety; I should not have had the
stomach for it afterward. I was not satisfied with the outside of the
house, but when I entered the open doorway, meaning to mount to the
upper floor, it was as if I were immediately blown into the street
again by the thick and noisome stench which filled the place from some
unmentionable if not unimaginable source.

It was like a filthy insult to the great presence whose sacred shrine
the house should have been religiously kept. But Cervantes dead was as
forgotten in Valladolid as Cervantes living had been. In some paroxysm
of civic pride the tablet had been set in the wall and then the house
abandoned to whatever might happen. I thought foul shame of Valladolid
for her neglect, and though she might have answered that her burden of
memories was more than she could bear, that she could not be forever
keeping her celebrity sweet, still I could have retorted, But Cervantes,
but Cervantes! There was only one Cervantes in the world and there never
would be another, and could not she watch over this poor once home of
his for his matchless sake? Then if Valladolid had come back at me with
the fact that Cervantes had lived pretty well all over Spain, and what
had Seville done, Cordova done, Toledo done, Madrid done, for the upkeep
of his divers sojourns more than she had done, after placing a tablet
in his house wall?--certainly I could have said that this did not excuse
her, but I must have owned that she was not alone, though she seemed
most to blame.



IX

[Illustration: 11 THE HOUSE IN WHICH PHILIP II. WAS BORN]

Now I look back and am glad I had not consciously with me, as we drove
away, the boy who once meant to write the life of Cervantes, and who
I knew from my recollection of his idolatry of that chief of Spaniards
would not have listened to the excuses of Valladolid for a moment.
All appeared fair and noble in that Spain of his which shone with such
allure far across the snows through which he trudged morning and evening
with his father to and from the printing-office, and made his dream
of that great work the common theme of their talk. Now the boy is as
utterly gone as the father, who was a boy too at heart, but who died a
very old man many years ago; and in the place of both is another old man
trammeled in his tangled memories of Spain visited and unvisited.

It would be a poor sort of make-believe if this survivor pretended any
lasting indignation with Valladolid because of the stench of Cervantes’s
house. There are a great many very bad smells in Spain everywhere, and
it is only fair to own that a psychological change toward Valladolid had
been operating itself in me since luncheon which Valladolid was not very
specifically to blame for. Up to the time the wedding guests left us we
had said Valladolid was the most interesting city we had ever seen, and
we would like to stay there a week; then, suddenly, we began to turn
against it. One thing: the weather had clouded, and it was colder. But
we determined to be just, and after we left the house of Cervantes we
drove out to the promenades along the banks of the Pisuerga, in hopes of
a better mind, for we had read that they were the favorite resort of the
citizens in summer, and we did not know but even in autumn we might
have some glimpses of their recreation. Our way took us sorrowfully
past hospitals and prisons and barracks; and when we came out on the
promenade we found ourselves in the gloom of close set mulberry trees,
with the dust thick on the paths under them. The leaves hung leaden gray
on the boughs and there could never have been a spear of grass along
those disconsolate ways. The river was shrunken in its bed, and where
its current crept from pool to pool, women were washing some of the rags
which already hung so thick on the bushes that it was wonderful there
should be any left to wash. Squalid children abounded, and at one
point a crowd of people had gathered and stood looking silently and
motionlessly over the bank. We looked too and on a sand-bar near the
shore we saw three gendarmes standing with a group of civilians. Between
their fixed and absolutely motionless figures lay the body of a drowned
man on the sand, poorly clothed in a workman’s dress, and with his poor,
dead clay-white hands stretched out from him on the sand, and his gray
face showing to the sky. Everywhere people were stopping and staring;
from one of the crowded windows of the nearest house a woman hung with
a rope of her long hair in one hand, and in the other the brush she was
passing over it. On the bridge the man who had found the body made a
merit of his discovery which he dramatized to a group of spectators
without rousing them to a murmur or stirring them from their statuesque
fixity. His own excitement in comparison seemed indecent.



X


It was now three o’clock and I thought I might be in time to draw some
money on my letter of credit, at the bank which we had found standing in
a pleasant garden in the course of our stroll through the town the night
before. We had said, How charming it would be to draw money in such an
environment; and full of the romantic expectation, I offered my letter
at the window, where after a discreet interval I managed to call from
their preoccupation some unoccupied persons within. They had not a very
financial air, and I thought them the porters they really were, with
some fear that I had come after banking-hours. But they joined in
reassuring me, and told me that if I would return after five o’clock the
proper authorities would be there.

I did not know then what late hours Spain kept in every way; but I
concealed my surprise; and I came back at the time suggested, and
offered my letter at the window with a request for ten pounds, which I
fancied I might need. A clerk took the letter and scrutinized it with
a deliberation which I thought it scarcely merited. His self-respect
doubtless would not suffer him to betray that he could not read the
English of it; and with an air of wishing to consult higher authority he
carried it to another clerk at a desk across the room. To this official
it seemed to come as something of a blow. Tie made a show of reading it
several times over, inside and out, and then from the pigeonhole of his
desk he began to accumulate what I supposed corroborative documents,
or _pieces justificatives._ When lie had amassed a heap several inches
thick, he rose and hurried out through the gate, across the hall where
I sat, into a room beyond. He returned without in any wise referring
himself to me and sat down at his desk again. The first clerk explained
to the anxious face with which I now approached him that the second
clerk had taken my letter to the director. I went back to my seat and
waited fifteen minutes longer, fifteen having passed already; then I
presented my anxious face, now somewhat indignant, to the first clerk
again. “What is the director doing with my letter?” The first clerk
referred my question to the second clerk, who answered from his place,
“He is verifying the signature.” “But what signature?” I wondered to
myself, reflecting that he had as yet had none of mine. Could it be the
signature of my New York banker or my London one? I repaired once
more to the window, after another wait, and said in polite but firm
Castilian, “Do me the favor to return me my letter.” A commotion
of protest took place within the barrier, followed by the repeated
explanation that the director was verifying the signature. I returned
to toy place and considered that the suspicious document which I had
presented bore record of moneys drawn in London, in Paris, in Tours, in
San Sebastian, which ought to have allayed all suspicion; then for the
last time I repaired to the window; more in anger now than in sorrow,
and gathered nay severest Spanish together for a final demand: “Do me
the favor to give me back my letter _without the pounds sterling.”_ The
clerks consulted together; one of them decided to go to the director’s
room, and after a dignified delay he came back with my letter, and
dashed it down before me with the only rudeness I experienced in Spain.

I was glad to get it on any terms; it was only too probable that it
would have been returned without the money if I had not demanded it;
and I did what I could with the fact that this amusing financial
transaction, involving a total of fifty dollars, had taken place in the
chief banking-house of one of the commercial and industrial centers of
the country. Valladolid is among other works the seat of the locomotive
works of the northern railway lines, and as these machines average
a speed of twenty-five miles an hour with express trains, it seemed
strange to me that something like their rapidity should not have
governed the action of that bank director in forcing me to ask back my
discredited letter of credit.



XI


That evening the young voices and the young feet began to chirp again
under our sun balcony. But there had been no sun in it since noon and
presently a cold thin rain was falling and driving the promenaders under
the arcades, where they were perhaps not unhappier for being closely
massed. We missed the prettiness of the spectacle, though as yet we did
not know that it was the only one of the sort we might hope to see in
Spain, where women walk little indoors, and when they go out, drive and
increase in the sort of loveliness which may be weighed and measured.
Even under the arcades the promenade ceased early and in the adjoining
Plaza Mayor, where the _autos da fe_ once took place, the rain still
earlier made an end of the municipal music, and the dancing of the
lower ranks of the people. But we were fortunate in our Chilian friend’s
representation of the dancing; he came to our table at dinner, and did
with charming sympathy a mother waltzing with her babe in arms for a
partner.

He came to the omnibus at the end of the promenade, when we were
starting for the station next morning, not yet shaven, in his friendly
zeal to make sure of seeing us off, and we parted with confident
prophecies of meeting each other again in Madrid. We had already bidden
adieu with effusion to our landlady-sisters-and-mother, and had wished
to keep forever our own the adorable _chico_ who, when cautioned against
trying to carry a very heavy bag, valiantly jerked it to his shoulder
and made off with it to the omnibus, as if it were nothing. I do not
believe such a boy breathes out of Spain, where I hope he will grow up
to the Oriental calm of so many of his countrymen, and rest from the
toils of his nonage. At the last moment after the Chilian had left us,
we perceived that one of our trunks had been forgotten, and the _chico_
coursed back to the hotel for it and returned with the delinquent porter
bearing it, as if to make sure of his bringing it.

When it was put on top of the omnibus, and we were in probably
unparalleled readiness for starting to the station, at an hour when
scarcely anybody else in Valladolid was up, a mule composing a portion
of our team immediately fell down, as if startled too abruptly from a
somnambulic dream. I really do not remember how it was got to its feet
again; but I remember the anguish of the delay and the fear that we
might not be able to escape from Valladolid after all our pains in
trying for the Sud-Express at that hour; and I remember that when we
reached the station we found that the Sud-Express was forty minutes
behind time and that we were a full hour after that before starting for
Madrid.




V. PHASES OF MADRID


I fancied that a kind of Gothic gloom was expressed in the black
wine-skins of Old Castile, as contrasted with the fairer color of those
which began to prevail even so little south of Burgos as Valladolid. I
am not sure that the Old Castilian wine-skins derived their blackness
from the complexion of the pigs, or that there are more pale pigs in the
south than in the north of Spain; I am sure only of a difference in
the color of the skins, which may have come from a difference in the
treatment of them. At a venture I should not say that there were more
black pigs in Old Castile than in Andalusia, as we observed them from
the train, rooting among the unpromising stubble of the wheat-lands.
Rather I should say that the prevailing pig of all the Spains was brown,
corresponding to the reddish blondness frequent among both the Visigoths
and the Moors. The black pig was probably the original, prehistoric
Iberian pig, or of an Italian strain imported by the Romans; but I do
not offer this as more than a guess. The Visigothic or Arabic pig showed
himself an animal of great energy and alertness wherever we saw him,
and able to live upon the lean of the land where it was leanest. At his
youngest he abounded in the furrows and hollows, matching his russet
with the russet of the soil and darting to and fro with the quickness
of a hare. He was always of an ingratiating humorousness and endeared
himself by an apparent readiness to enter into any joke that was going,
especially that of startling the pedestrian by his own sudden apparition
from behind a tuft of grass or withered stalk. I will not be sure, but I
think we began to see his kind as soon as we got out of Yalladolid, when
we began running through a country wooded with heavy, low-crowned pines
that looked like the stone-pines of Italy, but were probably not the
same. After twenty miles of this landscape the brown pig with pigs of
other complexions, as much guarded as possible, multiplied among the
patches of vineyard. He had there the company of tall black goats and
rather unhappy-looking black sheep, all of whom he excelled in the
art of foraging among the vines and the stubble of the surrounding
wheat-lands. After the vineyards these opened and stretched themselves
wearily, from low dull sky to low dull sky, nowise cheered in aspect by
the squalid peasants, scratching their tawny expanses with those crooked
prehistoric sticks which they use for plows in Spain. It was a dreary
landscape, but it was good to be out of Valladolid on any terms, and
especially good to be away from the station which we had left emulating
the odors of the house of Cervantes.



I


There had been the usual alarm about the lack of places in the
Sud-Express which we were to take at Valladolid, but we chanced getting
them, and our boldness was rewarded by getting a whole compartment to
ourselves, and a large, fat friendly conductor with an eye out for tips
in every direction. The lunch in our dining-car was for the first time
in Spain not worth the American price asked for it; everywhere else
on the Spanish trains I must testify that the meals were excellent and
abundant; and the refection may now have felt in some obscure sort the
horror of the world in which the Sud-Express seemed to have lost itself.
The scene was as alien to any other known aspect of our comfortable
planet as if it were the landscape of some star condemned for the
sins of its extinct children to wander through space in unimaginable
desolation. It seldom happens in Spain that the scenery is the same on
both sides of the railroad track, but here it was malignly alike on one
hand and on the other, though we seemed to be running along the slope of
an upland, so that the left hand was higher and the right lower. It was
more as if we were crossing the face of some prodigious rapid, whose
surges were the measureless granite boulders tossing everywhere in
masses from the size of a man’s fist to the size of a house. In a wild
chaos they wallowed against one another, the greater bearing on their
tops or between them on their shoulders smaller regular or irregular
masses of the same gray stone. Everywhere among their awful shallows
grew gray live-oaks, and in among the rocks and trees spread tufts of
gray shrub. Suddenly, over the frenzy of this mad world, a storm of cold
rain broke whirling, and cold gray mists drove, blinding the windows and
chilling us where we sat within. From time to time the storm lifted and
showed again this vision of nature hoary as if with immemorial eld; if
at times we seemed to have run away from it again it closed in upon us
and held us captive in its desolation.

With longer and longer intervals of relief it closed upon us for the
last time in the neighborhood of the gloomiest pile that ever a man
built for his life, his death and his prayer between; but before we came
to the palace-tomb of the Escorial, we had clear in the distance the
vision of the walls and roofs and towers of the medieval city of Avila.
It is said to be the perfectest relic of the Middle Ages after or before
Rothenburg, and we who had seen Rothenburg solemnly promised ourselves
to come back some day from Madrid and spend it in Avila. But we never
came, and Avila remains a vision of walls and roofs and towers tawny
gray glimpsed in a rift of the storm that again swept toward the Spanish
capital.



II


We were very glad indeed to get to Madrid, though dismayed by
apprehensions of the _octroi_ which we felt sure awaited us. We recalled
the behavior of the amiable officer of Valladolid who bumped our baggage
about on the roof of our omnibus, and we thought that in Madrid such
an officer could not do less than shatter our boxes and scatter their
contents in the streaming street. What was then our surprise, our
joy, to find that in Madrid there was no _octroi_ at all, and that the
amiable _mozos_ who took our things hardly knew what we meant when we
asked for it. At Madrid they scarcely wanted our tickets at the gate of
the station, and we found ourselves in the soft embrace of modernity,
so dear after the feudal rigors of Old Castile, when we mounted into a
motor-bus and sped away through the spectacular town, so like Paris,
so like Rome as to have no personality of its own except in this
similarity, and never stopped till the liveried service swarmed upon us
at the door of the Hotel Ritz.

Here the modernity which had so winningly greeted us at the station
welcomed us more and consolingly. There was not only steam-heating, but
the steam was on! It wanted but a turn of the hand at the radiators, and
the rooms were warm. The rooms themselves responded to our appeal
and looked down into a silent inner court, deaf to the clatter of the
streets, and sleep haunted the very air, distracted, if at all, by the
instant facility and luxury of the appliances. Was it really in Spain
that a metallic tablet at the bed-head invited the wanderer to call with
one button for the _camerero,_ another for the _camerera,_ and another
for the _mozo,_ who would all instantly come speaking English like so
many angels? Were we to have these beautiful chambers for a humble two
dollars and forty cents a day; and if it was true, why did we ever
leave them and try for something ever so much worse and so very little
cheaper? Let me be frank with the reader whom I desire for my friend,
and own that we were frightened from the Eitz Hotel by the rumor of
Eitz prices. I paid my bill there, which was imagined with scrupulous
fullness to the last possible _centimo,_ and so I may disinterestedly
declare that the Eitz is the only hotel in Madrid where you get the
worth of your money, even when the money seems more but scarcely is so.
In all Spain I know of only two other hotels which may compare with it,
and these are the English hotels, one at Ronda and one at Algeciras. If
I add falteringly the hotel where we stayed a night in Toledo and the
hotel where we abode a fortnight in Seville, I heap the measure of merit
and press it down.

We did not begin at once our insensate search for another hotel in
Madrid: but the sky had cleared and we went out into the strange capital
so uncharacteristically characteristic, to find tea at a certain cafe
we had heard of. It was in the Calle de Alcala (a name which so richly
stimulates the imagination), and it looked out across this handsome
street, to a club that I never knew the name of, where at a series of
open windows was a flare of young men in silk hats leaning out on their
elbows and letting no passing fact of the avenue escape them. It was
worth their study, and if I had been an idle young Spaniard, or an
idle old one, I would have asked nothing better than to spend my Sunday
afternoon poring from one of those windows on my well-known world of
Madrid as it babbled by. Even in my quality of alien, newly arrived and
ignorant of that world, I already felt its fascination.

Sunday in Spain is perhaps different from other days of the week to
the Spanish sense, but to the traveler it is too like them to be
distinguishable except in that guilty Sabbath consciousness which is
probably an effect from original sin in every Protestant soul. The
casual eye could not see but that in Madrid every one seemed as much or
as little at work as on any other day. My own casual eye noted that the
most picturesquely evident thing in the city was the country life which
seemed so to pervade it. In the Calle de Alcala, flowing to the Prado
out of the Puerta del Sol, there passed a current of farm-carts and
farm-wagons more conspicuous than any urban vehicles, as they jingled
by, with men and women on their sleigh-belled donkeys, astride or atop
the heavily laden panniers. The donkeys bore a part literally leading in
all the rustic equipages, and with their superior intellect found a way
through the crowds for the string-teams of the three or four large mules
that followed them in harness. Whenever we saw a team of mules without
this sage guidance we trembled for their safety; as for horses, no team
of them attempted the difficult passage, though ox-trains seemed able to
dispense with the path-finding donkeys.

To be sure, the horses abounded in the cabs, which were mostly bad, more
or less. It is an idiosyncrasy of the cabs in Madrid that only the open
victorias have rubber tires; if you go in a coupe you must consent to
be ruthlessly bounced over the rough pavements on wheels unsoftened. It
“follows as the night the day” that the coupe is not in favor, and that
in its conservative disuse it accumulates a smell not to be acquired out
of Spain. One such vehicle I had which I thought must have been stabled
in the house of Cervantes at Valladolid, and rushed on the Sud-Express
for my service at Madrid; the stench in it was such that after a short
drive to the house of a friend I was fain to dismiss it at a serious
loss in pesetas and take the risk of another which might have been as
bad. Fortunately a kind lady intervened with a private carriage and a
coachman shaved that very day, whereas my poor old cabman, who was of
one and the same smell as his cab, had not been shaved for three days.



III


This seems the place to note the fact that no Spaniard in humble life
shaves oftener than once in three days, and that you always see him on
the third day just before he has shaved. But all this time I have left
myself sitting in the cafe looking out on the club that looks out on the
Calle de Aleala, and keeping the waiter waiting with a jug of hot milk
in his hand while I convince him (such a friendly, smiling man he is,
and glad of my instruction!) that in tea one always wants the milk cold.
To him that does not seem reasonable, since one wants it hot in coffee
and chocolate; but he yields to my prejudice, and after that he always
says, _“Ah, leche fria!”_ and we smile radiantly together in the bond of
comradery which cold milk establishes between man and man in Spain. As
yet tea is a novelty in that country, though the young English queen,
universally loved and honored, has made it the fashion in high life.
Still it is hard to overcome such a prepossession as that of hot milk in
tea, and in some places you cannot get it cold for love or money.

But again I leave myself waiting in that cafe, where slowly, and at last
not very overwhelmingly in number, the beautiful plaster-pale Spanish
ladies gather with their husbands and have chocolate. It is a riotous
dissipation for them, though it does not sound so; the home is the
Spanish ideal of the woman’s place, as it is of our anti-suffragists,
though there is nothing corresponding to our fireside in it; and the
cafe is her husband’s place without her. When she walks in the street,
where mostly she drives, she walks with her eyes straight before her; to
look either to the right or left, especially if a man is on either hand,
is a superfluity of naughtiness. The habit of looking straight ahead is
formed in youth, and it continues through life; so at least it is said,
and if I cannot affirm it I will not deny it. The beautiful black eyes
so discreetly directed looked as often from mantillas as hats, even in
Madrid, which is the capital, and much infested by French fashions. You
must not believe it when any one tells you that the mantilla is going
out; it prevails everywhere, and it increases from north to south, and
in Seville it is almost universal. Hats are worn there only in driving,
but at Madrid there were many hats worn in walking, though whether
by Spanish women or by foreigners, of course one could not, though a
wayfaring man and an American, stop them to ask.

There are more women in the street at Madrid than in the provincial
cities, perhaps because it is the capital and cosmopolitan, and perhaps
because the streets are many of them open and pleasant, though there arc
enough of them dark and narrow, too. I do not know just why the Puerta
del Sol seems so much ampler and gayer than the Calle de Alcala; it is
not really wider, but it seems more to concentrate the coming and
going, and with its high-hoteled opposition of corners is of a supreme
spectacularity. Besides, the name is so fine: what better could any city
place ask than to be called Gate of the Sun? Perpetual trams wheeze and
whistle through it; large shops face upon it; the sidewalks are thronged
with passers, and the many little streets debouching on it pour their
streams of traffic and travel into it on the right and left. It is
mainly fed by the avenues leaving the royal palace on the west, and its
eddying tide empties through the Calle de Alcala into the groves and
gardens of the Prado whence it spreads over all the drives and parks
east and north and south.

For a capital purposed and planned Madrid is very well indeed. It has
not the symmetry which forethought gave the topography of Washington, or
the beauty which afterthought has given Paris. But it makes you think
a little of Washington, and a great deal of Paris, though a great deal
more yet of Rome. It is Renaissance so far as architecture goes, and it
is very modern Latin; so that it is of the older and the newer Rome that
it makes you think. From, time to time it seemed to me I must be in.
Rome, and I recovered myself with a pang to find I was not. Yet, as I
say, Madrid was very well indeed, and when I reflected I had to own that
I had come there on purpose to be there, and not to be in Rome, where
also I should have been so satisfied to be.



IV


I do not know but we chose our hotel when we left the Ritz because it
was so Italian, so Roman. It had a wide grape arbor before it, with
a generous spread of trellised roof through which dangled the grape
bunches among the leaves of the vine. Around this arbor at top went a
balustrade of marble, with fat _putti,_ or marble boys, on the corners,
who would have watched over the fruit if they had not been preoccupied
with looking like so many thousands of _putti_ in Italy. They looked
like Italian _putti_ with a difference, the difference that passes
between all the Spanish things and the Italian things they resemble.
They were coarser and grosser in figure, and though amiable enough
in aspect, they lacked the refinement, the air of pretty appeal which
Italian art learns from nature to give the faces of _putti._ Yet they
were charming, and it was always a pleasure to look at them posing in
pairs at the corners of the balustrade, and I do not know but dozing in
the hours of _siesta._ If they had been in wood Spanish art would have
known how to make them better, but in stone they had been gathering
an acceptable weather stain during the human generations they had been
there, and their plump stomachs were weather-beaten white.

I do not know if they had been there long enough to have witnessed
the murder of Cromwell’s ambassador done in our street by two Jacobite
gentlemen who could not abide his coming to honor in the land where
they were in exile from England. That must have been sometime about the
middle of the century after Philip II., bigot as he was, could not bear
the more masterful bigotry of the archbishop of Toledo, and brought his
court from that ancient capital, and declared Madrid henceforward the
capital forever; which did not prevent Philip III. from taking his court
to Valladolid and making that the capital _en titre_ when he liked.
However, some other Philip or Charles, or whoever, returned with his
court to Madrid and it has ever since remained the capital, and has
come, with many natural disadvantages, to look its supremacy. For my
pleasure I would rather live in Seville, but that would be a luxurious
indulgence of the love of beauty, and like a preference of Venice in
Italy when there was Rome to live in. Madrid is not Rome, but it makes
you think of Rome as I have said, and if it had a better climate it
would make you think of Rome still more. Notoriously, however, it has
not a good climate and we had not come at the right season to get the
best of the bad. The bad season itself was perverse, for the rains do
not usually begin in their bitterness at Madrid before November, and now
they began early in October. The day would open fair, with only a few
little white clouds in the large blue, and if we could trust other’s
experience we knew it would rain before the day closed; only a morning
absolutely clear could warrant the hope of a day fair till sunset.
Shortly after noon the little white clouds would drift together and be
joined by others till they hid the large blue, and then the drops would
begin to fall. By that time the air would have turned raw and chill, and
the rain would be of a cold which it kept through the night.

This habit of raining every afternoon was what kept us from seeing rank,
riches, and beauty in the Paseo de la Castellana, where they drive only
on fine afternoons; they now remained at home even more persistently
than we did, for with that love of the fashionable world for which I am
always blaming myself I sometimes took a cab and fared desperately forth
in pursuit of them. Only once did I seem to catch a glimpse of them, and
that once I saw a closed carriage weltering along the drive between the
trees and the trams that border it, with the coachman and footman snugly
sheltered under umbrellas on the box. This was something, though not a
great deal; I could not make out the people inside the carriage; yet it
helped to certify to me the fact that the great world does drive in the
Paseo de la Castellana and does not drive in the Paseo del Prado; that
is quite abandoned, even on the wettest days, to the very poor and
perhaps unfashionable people.



V

[Illustration: 12 THE BULL-RING, MADRID]

It may have been our comparative defeat with fashion in its most
distinctive moments of pleasuring (for one thing I wished to see how the
dreariness of Madrid gaiety in the Paseo de la Castellana would compare
with that of Roman gaiety on the Pincian) which made us the more
determined to see a bull-fight in the Spanish capital. We had vowed
ourselves in coming to Spain to set the Spaniards an example of
civilization by inflexibly refusing to see a bull-fight under any
circumstances or for any consideration; but it seemed to us that it was
a sort of public duty to go and see the crowd, what it was like, in the
time and place where the Spanish crowd is most like itself. We would go
and remain in our places till everybody else was placed, and then,
when the picadors and banderilleros and matadors were all ranged in the
arena, and the gate was lifted, and the bull came rushing madly in, we
would rise before he had time to gore anybody, and go inexorably away.
This union of self-indulgence and self-denial seemed almost an act of
piety when we learned that the bull-fight was to be on Sunday, and we
prepared ourselves with tickets quite early in the week. On Saturday
afternoon it rained, of course, but the worst was that it rained on
Sunday morning, and the clouds did not lift till noon. Then the glowing
concierge of our hotel, a man so gaily hopeful, so expansively promising
that I could hardly believe he was not an Italian, said that there could
not possibly be a bull-fight that day; the rain would have made the
arena so slippery that man, horse, and bull would all fall down together
in a common ruin, with no hope whatever of hurting one another.

We gave up this bull-fight at once, but we were the more resolved to see
a bull-fight because we still owed it to the Spanish people to come away
before we had time to look at it, and we said we would certainly go at
Cordova where we should spend the next Sabbath. At Cordova we learned
that it was the closed season for bull-fighting, but vague hopes of
usefulness to the Spanish public were held out to us at Seville, the
very metropolis of bull-fighting, where the bulls came bellowing up
from their native fields athirst for the blood of the profession and
the _aficionados,_ who outnumber there the amateurs of the whole rest
of Spain. But at Seville we were told that there would be no more
bull-feasts, as the Spaniards much more preferably call the bullfights,
till April, and now we were only in October. We said, Never mind; we
would go to a bull-feast in Granada; but at Granada the season was even
more hopelessly closed. In Ronda itself, which is the heart, as Seville
is the home of the bull-feast, we could only see the inside of the empty
arena; and at Algeciras the outside alone offered itself to our vision.
By this time the sense of duty was so strong upon us that if there had
been a bull-feast we would have shared in it and stayed through till the
last _espada_ dropped dead, gored through, at the knees of the last
bull transfixed by his unerring sword; and the other _toreros,_
the _banderilleros_ with their darts and the picadors with their
disemboweled horses, lay scattered over the blood-stained arena. Such
is the force of a high resolve in strangers bent upon a lesson of
civilization to a barbarous people when disappointed of their purpose.
But we learned too late that only in Madrid is there any bull-feasting
in the winter. In the provincial cities the bulls are dispirited by the
cold; but in the capital, for the honor of the nation, they somehow pull
themselves together and do their poor best to kill and be killed. Yet
in the capital where the zeal of the bulls, and I suppose, of the
bull-fighters, is such, it is said that there is a subtle decay in the
fashionable, if not popular, esteem of the only sport which remembers
in the modern world the gladiatorial shows of imperial Rome. It is said,
but I do not know whether it is true, that the young English queen who
has gladly renounced her nation and religion for the people who seem so
to love her, cannot endure the bloody sights of the bull-feast; and when
it comes to the horses dragging their entrails across the ring, or the
_espada_ despatching the bull, or the bull tossing a _landerillero_
in the air she puts up her fan. It is said also that the young Spanish
king, who has shown himself such a merciful-minded youth, and seems
so eager to make the best of the bad business of being a king at all,
sympathizes with her, and shows an obviously abated interest at these
supreme moments.

I do not know whether or not it was because we had failed with the
bull-feast that we failed to go to any sort of public entertainment in
Madrid. It certainly was in my book to go to the theater, and see some
of those modern plays which I had read so many of, and which I had
translated one of for Lawrence Barrett in the far-off days before the
flood of native American dramas now deluging our theater. That play was
“Un Drama Nueva,” by Estebanez, which between us we called “Yorick’s
Love” and which my very knightly tragedian made his battle-horse during
the latter years of his life. In another version Barrett had seen it
fail in New York, but its failure left him with the lasting desire to do
it himself. A Spanish friend, now dead but then the gifted and eccentric
Consul General at Quebec, got me a copy of the play from Madrid, and I
thought there was great reason in a suggestion from another friend that
it had failed because it put Shakespeare on the stage as one of its
characters; but it seemed to me that the trouble could be got over by
making the poet Heywood represent the Shakespearian epoch. I did this
and the sole obstacle to its success seemed removed. It went, as the
enthusiastic Barrett used to say, “with a shout,” though to please him I
had hurt it all I could by some additions and adaptations; and though it
was a most ridiculously romantic story of the tragical loves of Yorick
(whom the Latins like to go on imagining out of Hamlet a much more
interesting and important character than Shakespeare ever meant him to
be fancied), and ought to have remained the fiasco it began, still it
gained Barrett much money and me some little.

I was always proud of this success, and I boasted of it to the
bookseller in Madrid, whom I interested in finding me some still
moderner plays after quite failing to interest another bookseller. Your
Spanish merchant seems seldom concerned in a mercantile transaction;
but perhaps it was not so strange in the case of this Spanish bookseller
because he was a German and spoke a surprising English in response to my
demand whether he spoke any. He was the frowsiest bookseller I ever saw,
and he was in the third day of his unshavenness with a shirt-front
and coat-collar plentifully bedandruffed from his shaggy hair; but he
entered into the spirit of my affair and said if that Spanish play had
succeeded so wonderfully, then I ought to pay fifty per cent, more than
the current price for the other Spanish plays which I wanted him to get
me. I laughed with him at the joke which I found simple earnest when our
glowing concierge gave me the books next day, and I perceived that
the proposed supplement had really been paid for them on my account.
I should not now be grieving for this incident if the plays had proved
better reading than they did on experiment. Some of them were from the
Catalan, and all of them dealt with the simpler actual life of Spain;
but they did not deal impressively with it, though they seemed to me
more hopeful in conception than certain psychological plays of ten or
fifteen years ago, which the Spanish authors had too clearly studied
from Ibsen.

They might have had their effect in the theater, but the rainy weather
had not only spoiled my sole chance of the bull-feast; the effect of it
in a stubborn cold forbade me the night air and kept me from testing
any of the new dramas on the stage, which is always giving new dramas in
Madrid. The stage, or rather the theater, is said to be truly a passion
with the Madrilenos, who go every night to see the whole or the part of
a play and do not mind seeing the same play constantly, as if it were
opera. They may not care to see the play so much as to be seen at it;
that happens in every country; but no doubt the plays have a charm which
did not impart itself from the printed page. The companies are reported
very good: but the reader must take this from me at second hand, as he
must take the general society fact. I only know that people ask you to
dinner at nine, and if they go to the theater afterward they cannot
well come away till toward one o’clock. It is after this hour that the
_tertulia,_ that peculiarly Spanish function, begins, but how long it
lasts or just what it is I do not know. I am able to report confidently,
however, that it is a species of _salon_ and that it is said to be
called a _tertulia_ because of the former habit in the guests, and no
doubt the hostess, of quoting the poet Tertullian. It is of various
constituents, according as it is a fashionable, a literary, or an
artistic _tertulia,_ or all three with an infusion of science. Oftenest,
I believe, it is a domestic affair and all degrees of cousinship resort
to it with brothers and sisters and uncles, who meet with the pleasant
Latin liking of frequent meetings among kindred. In some cases no doubt
it is a brilliant reunion where lively things are said; in others it
may be dull; in far the most cases it seems to be held late at night or
early in the morning.



VI


It was hard, after being shut up several days, that one must not go out
after nightfall, and if one went out by day, one must go with closed
lips and avoid all talking in the street under penalty of incurring
the dreaded pneumonia of Madrid. Except for that dreaded pneumonia,
I believe the air of Madrid is not so pestilential as it has been
reported. Public opinion is beginning to veer in favor of it, just as
the criticism which has pronounced Madrid commonplace and unpicturesque
because it is not obviously old, is now finding a charm in it peculiar
to the place. Its very modernity embodies and imparts the charm, which
will grow as the city grows in wideness and straightness. It is in the
newer quarter that it recalls Rome or the newer quarters of Rome; but
there is an old part of it that recalls the older part of Naples, though
the streets are not quite so narrow nor the houses so high. There
is like bargaining at the open stands with the buyers and sellers
chaffering over them; there is a likeness in the people’s looks, too,
but when it comes to the most characteristic thing of Naples, Madrid is
not in it for a moment. I mean the bursts of song which all day long and
all night long you hear in Naples; and this seems as good a place as any
to say that to my experience Spain is a songless land. We had read much
of the song and dance there, but though the dance might be hired the
song was never offered for love or money. To be sure, in Toledo, once,
a woman came to her door across the way under otir hotel window and sang
over the slops she emptied into the street, but then she shut the door
and we heard her no more. In Cordova there was as brief a peal of music
from a house which we passed, and in Algeciras we heard one short sweet
strain from a girl whom we could not see behind her lattice. Besides
these chance notes we heard no other by any chance. But this is by no
means saying that there is not abundant song in Spain, only it was kept
quiet; I suppose that if we had been there in the spring instead of the
fall we should at least have heard the birds singing. In Madrid there
were not even many street cries; a few in the Puerta del Sol, yes; but
the peasants who drove their mule-teams through the streets scarcely
lifted their voices in reproach or invitation; they could trust the wise
donkeys that led them to get them safely through the difficult places.
There was no audible quarreling among the cabmen, and when you called a
cab it was useless to cry “Heigh!” or shake your umbrella; you made
play with your thumb and finger in the air and sibilantly whispered;
otherwise the cabman ignored you and went on reading his newspaper. The
cabmen of Madrid are great readers, much greater, I am sorry to say,
than I was, for whenever I bought a Spanish paper I found it extremely
well written. Now and then I expressed my political preferences in
buying _El Liberal_ which I thought very able; even _El Imparcial_ I
thought able, though it is less radical than _El Liberal,_ a paper which
is published simultaneously in Madrid, with local editions in several
provincial cities.

For all the street silence there seemed to be a great deal of noise,
which I suppose came from the click of boots on the sidewalks and of
hoofs in roadways and the grind and squeal of the trams, with the harsh
smiting of the unrubbered tires of the closed cabs on the rough granite
blocks of the streets. But there are asphalted streets in Madrid where
the sound of the hoofs and wheels is subdued, and the streets rough and
smooth are kept of a cleanliness which would put the streets of New York
to shame if anything could. Ordinarily you could get cabs anywhere, but
if you wanted one very badly, when remote from a stand, there was more
than one chance that a cab marked _Libre_ would pass you with lordly
indifference. As for motor taxi-cabs there are none in the city, and
at Cook’s they would not take the responsibility of recommending any
automobiles for country excursions.



VII


I linger over these sordid details because I must needs shrink before
the mention of that incomparable gallery, the Museo del Prado. I am
careful not to call it the greatest gallery in the world, for I think of
what the Louvre, the Pitti, and the National Gallery are, and what
our own Metropolitan is going to be; but surely the Museo del Prado is
incomparable for its peculiar riches. It is part of the autobiographical
associations with my Spanish travel that when John Hay, who was not yet,
by thirty or forty years, the great statesman he became, but only the
breeziest of young Secretaries of Legation, just two weeks from his post
in Madrid, blew surprisingly into my little carpenter’s box in Cambridge
one day, he boasted almost the first thing that the best Titians in the
world were in the Prado galleries. I was too lately from Venice in 1867
not to have my inward question whether there could be anywhere a better
Titian than the “Assumption,” but I loved Hay too much to deny him
openly. I said that I had no doubt of it, and when the other day I
went to the Prado it was with the wish of finding him perfectly right,
triumphantly right. I had been from the first a strong partisan of
Titian, and in many a heated argument with Ruskin, unaware of our
controversy, I had it out with that most prejudiced partisan of
Tintoretto. I always got the better of him, as one does in such
dramatizations, where one frames one’s opponent’s feeble replies for
him; but now in the Prado, sadly and strangely enough, I began to wonder
if Ruskin might not have tacitly had the better of me all the time. If
Hay was right in holding that the best Titians in the world were in the
Prado, then I was wrong in having argued for Titian against Tintoretto
with Ruskin. I could only wish that I had the “Assumption” there, or
some of those senators whose portraits I remembered in the Academy
at Venice. The truth is that to my eye he seemed to weaken before the
Spanish masters, though I say this, who must confess that I failed to
see the room of his great portraits. The Italians who hold their own
with the Spaniards are Tintoretto and Veronese; even Murillo was more
than a match for Titian in such pictures of his as I saw (I must own
that I did not see the best, or nearly all), though properly speaking
Murillo is to be known at his greatest only in Seville.

But Velasquez, but Velasquez! In the Prado there is no one else present
when he is by, with his Philips and Charleses, and their “villainous
hanging of the nether lip,” with his hideous court dwarfs and his pretty
princes and princesses, his grandees and jesters, his allegories and
battles, his pastorals and chases, which fitly have a vast salon to
themselves, not only that the spectator may realize at once the rich
variety and abundance of the master, but that such lesser lights as
Rubens, Titian, Correggio, Giorgione, Tintoretto, Veronese, Rembrandt,
Zurbaran, El Greco, Murillo, may not be needlessly dimmed by his
surpassing splendor. I leave to those who know painting from the
painter’s art to appreciate the technical perfection of Velasquez; I
take my stand outside of that, and acclaim its supremacy in virtue of
that reality which all Spanish art has seemed always to strive for and
which in Velasquez it incomparably attains. This is the literary quality
which the most untechnical may feel, and which is not clearer to the
connoisseur than to the least unlearned.

After Velasquez in the Prado we wanted Goya, and more and more Goya, who
is as Spanish and as unlike Velasquez as can very well be. There was
not enough Goya abovestairs to satisfy us, but in the Goya room in the
basement there was a series of scenes from Spanish life, mostly frolic
campestral things, which he did as patterns for tapestries and which
came near being enough in their way: the way of that reality which is
so far from the reality of Velasquez. There, striving with their
strangeness, we found a young American husband and wife who said they
were going to Egypt, and seemed so anxious to get out of Spain that they
all but asked us which turning to take. They had a Baedeker of 1901.
which they had been deceived in at New York as the latest edition, and
they were apparently making nothing of the Goyas and were as if lost
down there in the basement. They were in doubt about going further in a
country which had inveigled them from Gibraltar as far as its capital.
They advised with us about Burgos, of all places, and when we said the
hotels in Burgos were very cold, they answered, Well they had thought
so; and the husband asked, Spain was a pretty good place to cut out,
wasn’t it? The wife expected that they would find some one in Egypt who
spoke English; she had expected they would speak French in Spain, but
had been disappointed. They had left their warm things at Gibraltar and
were almost frozen already. They were as good and sweet and nice as they
could be, and we were truly sorry to part with them and leave them to
what seemed to be a mistake which they were not to blame for.

I wish that all Europeans and all Europeanized Americans knew how to
value such incorruptible con-nationals, who would, I was sure, carry
into the deepest dark of Egypt and over the whole earth undimmed the
light of our American single-heartedness. I would have given something
to know from just which kind country town and companionable commonwealth
of our Union they had come, but I would not have given much, for I knew
that they could have come from almost any. In their modest satisfaction
with our own order of things, our language, our climate, our weather,
they would not rashly condemn those of other lands, but would give them
a fair chance; and, if when they got home again, they would have to
report unfavorably of the Old World to the Board of Trade or the Woman’s
Club, it would not be without intelligent reservations, even generous
reservations. They would know much more than they knew before they
came abroad, and if they had not seen Europe distinctly, but in a glass
darkly, still they would have seen it and would be the wiser and none
the worse for it. They would still be of their shrewd, pure American
ideals, and would judge their recollections as they judged their
experiences by them; and I wish we were all as confirmed in our fealty
to those ideals.

They were not, clearly enough, of that yet older fashion of Americans
who used to go through European galleries buying copies of the
masterpieces which the local painters were everywhere making. With this
pair the various postal-card reproductions must have long superseded the
desire or the knowledge of copies, and I doubt if many Americans of any
sort now support that honored tradition. Who, then, does support it? The
galleries of the Prado seem as full of copyists as they could have been
fifty years ago, and many of them were making very good copies. _I_ wish
I could say they were working as diligently as copyists used to work,
but copyists are now subject to frequent interruptions, not from the
tourists but from one another. They used to be all men, mostly grown
gray in their pursuit, but now they are both men and women, and younger
and the women are sometimes very pretty. In the Prado one saw several
pairs of such youth conversing together, forgetful of everything around
them, and on terms so very like flirtatious that they could not well be
distinguished from them. They were terms that other Spanish girls could
enjoy only with a wooden lattice and an iron grille between them and the
_novios_ outside their windows; and no tourist of the least heart could
help rejoicing with them. In the case of one who stood with her little
figure slanted and her little head tilted, looking up into the charmed
eyes of a tall _rubio,_ the tourist could not help rejoicing with the
young man too.

The day after our day in the Prado we found ourselves in the Museum of
Modern Art through the kind offices of our mistaken cabman when we were
looking for the Archaeological Museum. But we were not sorry, for some
of the new or newer pictures and sculptures were well worth seeing,
though we should never have tried for them. The force of the masters
which the ideals of the past held in restraint here raged in unbridled
excess: but if I like that force so much, why do I say excess? The new
or newer Spanish art likes an immense canvas, say as large as the side
of a barn, and it chooses mostly a tragical Spanish history in which it
riots with a young sense of power brave to see. There were a dozen of
those mighty dramas which I would have liked to bring away with me if
I had only had a town hall big enough to put them into after I got them
home. There were sculptures as masterful and as mighty as the pictures,
but among the paintings there was one that seemed to subdue all the
infuriate actions to the calm of its awful repose. This was Gisbert’s
“Execution of Torrejos and his Companions,” who were shot at Malaga in
1830 for a rising in favor of constitutional government. One does not,
if one is as wise as I, attempt to depict pictures, and I leave
this most heroic, most pathetic, most heart-breaking, most consoling
masterpiece for my reader to go and see for himself; it is almost worth
going as far as Madrid to see. Never in any picture do I remember the
like of those sad, brave, severe faces of the men standing up there to
be shot, where already their friends lay dead at their feet. A tumbled
top-hat in the foreground had an effect awfuller than a tumbled head
would have had.



VIII


Besides this and those other histories there were energetic portraits
and vigorous landscapes in the Modern Museum, where if we had not been
bent so on visiting the Archaeological Museum, we would willingly have
spent the whole morning. But we were determined to see the Peruvian and
Mexican antiquities which we believed must be treasured up in it; and
that we might not fail of finding it, I gave one of the custodians a
special peseta to take us out on the balcony and show us exactly how
to get to it. He was so precise and so full in his directions that we
spent the next half-hour in wandering fatuously round the whole region
before we stumbled, almost violently, upon it immediately back of the
Modern Museum. Will, it be credited that it was then hardly worth seeing
for the things we meant to see? The Peruvian and Mexican antiquities
were so disappointing that we would hardly look at the Etruscan, Greek,
and Roman things which it was so much richer in. To be sure, we had
seen and overseen the like of these long before in Italy; but they were
admirably arranged in this museum, so that without the eager help of the
custodians (which two cents would buy at any turn) we could have found
pleasure in them, whereas the Aztec antiquities were mostly copies in
plaster and the Inca jewelry not striking.

Before finding the place we had had the help of two policemen and one
newsboy and a postman in losing ourselves in the Prado where we mostly
sought for it, and with difficulty kept ourselves from being thrust into
the gallery there. In Spain a man, or even a boy, does not like to say
he does not know where a place is; he is either too proud or too polite
to do it, and he will misdirect you without mercy. But the morning was
bright, and almost warm, and we should have looked forward to weeks of
sunny weather if our experience had not taught us that it would rain in
the afternoon, and if greater experience than ours had not instructed
us that there would be many days of thick fog now before the climate of
Madrid settled itself to the usual brightness of February. We had time
to note again in the Paseo Castellana, which is the fashionable drive,
that it consists of four rows of acacias and tamarisks and a stretch
of lawn, with seats beside it; the rest is bare grasslessness, with a
bridle-path on one side and a tram-line on the other. If it had been
late afternoon the Paseo would have been filled with the gay world, but
being the late forenoon we had to leave it well-nigh unpeopled and go
back to our hotel, where the excellent midday breakfast merited the best
appetite one could bring to it.

In fact, all the meals of our hotel were good, and of course they were
only too superabundant. They were pretty much what they were everywhere
in Spain, and they were better everywhere than they were in Granada
where we paid most for them. They were appetizing, and not of the
cooking which the popular superstition attributes to Spain, where the
hotel cooking is not rank with garlic or fiery with pepper, as the
untraveled believe. At luncheon in our Madrid hotel we had a liberal
choice of eggs in any form, the delicious _arroz a la Valencia,_ a
kind of risotto, with saffron to savor and color it; veal cutlets or
beefsteak, salad, cheese, grapes, pears, and peaches, and often melon;
the ever-admirable melon of Spain, which I had learned to like in
England. At dinner there were soup, fish, entree, roast beef, lamb,
or poultry, vegetables, salad, sweet, cheese, and fruit; and there was
pretty poor wine _ad libitum_ at both meals. For breakfast there was
good and true (or true enough) coffee with rich milk, which if we
sometimes doubted it to be goat’s milk we were none the worse if none
the wiser for, as at dinner we were not either if we unwittingly ate kid
for lamb.

There were not many people in the hotel, but the dining-room was filled
by citizens who came in with the air of frequenters. They were
not people of fashion, as we readily perceived, but kindly-looking
mercantile folk, and ladies painted as white as newly calcimined house
walls; and all gravely polite. There was one gentleman as large round
as a hogshead, with a triple arrangement of fat at the back of his neck
which was fascinating. He always bowed when we met (necessarily with
his whole back) and he ate with an appetite proportioned to his girth.
I could wish still to know who and what he was, for he was a person very
much to my mind. So was the head waiter, dark, silent, clean-shaven, who
let me use my deplorable Spanish with him, till in the last days he came
out with some very fair English which he had been courteously concealing
from me. He looked own brother to the room-waiter in our corridor,
whose companionship I could desire always to have. One could not be so
confident of the sincerity of the little _camarera_ who slipped out of
the room with a soft, sidelong “_De nada”_ at one’s thanks for the hot
water in the morning; but one could stake one’s life on the goodness of
this _camarero._ He was not so tall as his leanness made him look; he
was of a national darkness of eyes and hair which as imparted to his
tertian clean-shavenness was a deep blue. He spoke, with a certain
hesitation, a beautiful Castilian, delicately lisping the sibilants and
strongly throating the gutturals; and what he said you could believe.
He never was out of the way when wanted; he darkled with your boots
and shoes in a little closet next your door, and came from it with the
morning coffee and rolls. In a stress of frequentation he appeared in
evening dress in the dining-room at night, and did honor to the place;
but otherwise he was to be seen only in our corridor, or in the cold,
dark chamber at the stair head where the _camareras_ sat sewing, kept in
check by his decorum. Without being explicitly advised of the fact, I am
sure he was the best of Catholics, and that he would have burnt me for a
heretic if necessary; but he would have done it from his conscience and
for my soul’s good after I had recanted. He seldom smiled, but when he
did you could see it was from his heart.

His contrast, his very antithesis, the joyous concierge, was always
smiling, and was every way more like an Italian than a Spaniard. He
followed us into the wettest Madrid weather with the sunny rays of his
temperament, and welcomed our returning cab with an effulgence that
performed the effect of an umbrella in the longish walk from the
curbstone to the hotel door, past the grape arbor whose fruit ripened
for us only in a single bunch, though he had so confidently prophesied
our daily pleasure in it. He seemed at first to be the landlord,
and without reference to higher authority he gave us beautiful rooms
overlooking the bacchanal vine which would have been filled with
sunshine if the weather had permitted. When he lapsed into the
concierge, he got us, for five pesetas, so deep and wide a wood-box,
covered with crimson cloth, that he was borne out by the fact in
declaring that the wood in it would last us as long as we stayed; it was
oak wood, hard as iron, and with the bellows that accompanied it we
blew the last billet of it into a solid coal by which we drank our last
coffee in that hotel. His spirit, his genial hopefulness, reconciled
us to the infirmities of the house during the period of transition
beginning for it and covering our stay. It was to be rebuilt on a scale
out-Ritzing the Ritz; but in the mean while it was not quite the Ritz.
There was a time when the elevator-shaft seemed to have tapped the awful
sources of the smell in the house of Cervantes at Valladolid, but I do
not remember what blameless origin the concierge assigned to the odor,
or whether it had anything to do with the horses and the hens which a
chance-opened back door showed us stabled in the rear of the hotel’s
grandiose entrance.

Our tourist clientele, thanks I think to the allure of our concierge for
all comers, was most respectable, though there was no public place for
people to sit but a small reading-room colder than the baths of Apollo.
But when he entered the place it was as if a fire were kindled in the
minute stove never otherwise heated, and the old English and French
newspapers freshened themselves up to the actual date as nearly as they
could. We were mostly, perhaps, Spanish families come from our several
provinces for a bit of the season which all Spanish families of
civil condition desire more or less of: lean, dark fathers, slender,
white-stuccoed daughters, and fat, white-stuccoed mothers; very
still-faced, and grave-mannered. We were also a few English, and from
time to time a few Americans, but I believe we were not, however worthy,
very great-world. The concierge who had so skilfully got us together was
instant in our errands and commissions, and when it came to two of us
being shut up with colds brought from Burgos it vas he who supplemented
the promptness of the apothecaries in sending our medicines and coming
himself at times to ask after our welfare.



IX


In a strange country all the details of life are interesting, and
we noticed with peculiar interest that Spain was a country where the
prescriptions were written in the vulgar tongue instead of the little
Latin in which prescriptions are addressed to the apothecaries of other
lands. We were disposed to praise the faculty if not the art for this,
but our doctor forbade. He said it was because the Spanish apothecaries
were so unlearned that they could not read even so little Latin as the
shortest prescription contained. Still I could not think the custom a
bad one, though founded on ignorance, and I do not see why it should not
have made for the greater safety of those who took the medicine if those
who put it up should follow a formula in their native tongue. I know
that at any rate we found the Spanish medicines beneficial and were
presently suffered to go out-of-doors, but with those severe injunctions
against going out after nightfall or opening our lips when we went out
by day. It was rather a bother, but it was fine to feel one’s self in
the classic Madrid tradition of danger from pneumonia and to be of the
dignified company of the Spanish gentlemen whom we met with the border
of their cloaks over their mouths; like being a character in a _capa y
espada_ drama.

There was almost as little acted as spoken drama in the streets. I have
given my impression of the songlessness of Spain in Madrid as elsewhere,
but if there was no street singing there was often street playing by
pathetic bands of blind minstrels with guitars and mandolins. The blind
abound everywhere in Spain in that profession of street beggary which
I always encouraged, believing as I do that comfort in this unbalanced
world cannot be too constantly reminded of misery. As the hunchbacks are
in Italy, or the wooden peg-legged in England, so the blind are in
Spain for number. I could not say how touching the sight of their
sightlessness was, or how the remembrance of it makes me wish that I had
carried more coppers with me when I set out. I would gladly authorize
the reader when he goes to Madrid to do the charity I often neglected;
he will be the better man, or even woman, for it; and he need not mind
if his beneficiary is occasionally unworthy; he may be unworthy himself;
I am sure I was.

But the Spanish street is rarely the theatrical spectacle that the
Italian street nearly always is. Now and then there was a bit in Madrid
which one would be sorry to have missed, such as the funeral of a civil
magistrate, otherwise unknown to me, which I saw pass my cafe window:
a most architectural black hearse, under a black roof, drawn by eight
black horses, sable-plumed. The hearse was open at the sides, with
the coffin fully showing, and a gold-laced _chapeau bras_ lying on
it. Behind came twenty or twenty-five gentlemen on foot in the modern
ineffectiveness of frock-coats and top-hats, and after them eight or ten
closed carriages. The procession passed without the least notice from
the crowd, which I saw at other times stirred to a flutter of emulation
in its small boys by companies of infantry marching to the music of
sharply blown bugles. The men were handsomer than Italian soldiers, but
not so handsome as the English, and in figure they were not quite the
deplorable pigmies one often sees in France. Their bugles, with the
rhythmical note which the tram-cars sound, and the guitars and mandolins
of the blind minstrels, made the only street music I remember in Madrid.

Between the daily rains, which came in the afternoon, the sun was
sometimes very hot, but it was always cool enough indoors. The indoors
interests were not the art or story of the churches. The intensest
Catholic capital in Christendom is in fact conspicuous in nothing more
than the reputed uninterestingness of its churches. I went into one of
them, however, with a Spanish friend, and I found it beautiful, most
original, and most impressive for its architecture and painting, but
I forget which church it was. We were going rather a desultory drive
through those less frequented parts of the city which I have mentioned
as like a sort of muted Naples: poor folk living much out-of-doors,
buying and selling at hucksters’ stands and booths, and swarming about
the chief market, where the guilty were formerly put to death, but the
innocent are now provisioned. Outside the market was not attractive, and
what it was within we did not look to see. We went rather to satisfy
my wish to see whether the Manzanares is as groveling a stream as the
guide-books pretend in their effort to give a just idea of the natural
disadvantages of Madrid, as the only great capital without an adequate
river. But whether abetted by the arts of my friend or not, the
Manzanares managed to conceal itself from me; when we left our carriage
and went to look for it, I saw only some pretty rills and falls which
it possibly fed and which lent their beauty to the charming up and down
hill walks, now a public pleasaunce, but formerly the groves and gardens
of the royal palace. Our talk in Spanish from him and Italian from me
was of Tolstoy and several esthetic and spiritual interests, and when
we remounted and drove back to the city, whom should I see, hard by the
King’s palace, but those dear Chilians of my heart whom we had left at
Valladolid--husband, wife, sister, with the addition of a Spanish lady
of very acceptable comeliness, in white gloves, and as blithe as they.
In honor of the capital the other ladies wore white gloves too, but the
husband and brother still kept the straw hat which I had first known him
in at San Sebastian, and which I hope yet to know him by in New York. It
was a glad clash of greetings which none of us tried to make coherent or
intelligible, and could not if we had tried. They acclaimed their hotel,
and I ours; but on both sides I dare say we had our reserves; and
then we parted, secure that the kind chances of travel would bring us
together again somewhere.

[Illustration: 13 GUARD-MOUNT IN THE PLAZA DE ARMAS, ROYAL PALACE, MADRID]

I did not visit the palace, but the Royal Armory I had seen two days
before on a gay morning that had not yet sorrowed to the afternoon’s
rain. At the gate of the palace I fell into the keeping of one of the
authorized guides whom I wish I could identify so that I could send the
reader to pay him the tip I came short in. It is a pang to think of
the repressed disappointment in his face when in a moment of insensate
sparing I gave him the bare peseta to which he was officially entitled,
instead of the two or three due his zeal and intelligence; and I
strongly urge my readers to be on their guard against a mistaken
meanness like mine. I can never repair that, for if I went back to the
Royal Armory I should not know him by sight, and if I sought among the
guides saying I was the stranger who had behaved in that shabby sort,
how would that identify me among so many other shabby strangers? He had
the intelligence to leave me and the constant companion of these travels
to ourselves as we went about that treasury of wonders, but before we
got to the armory he stayed us with a delicate gesture outside the court
of the palace till a troop for the guard-mounting had gone in. Then he
led us across the fine, beautiful quadrangle to the door of the museum,
and waited for us there till we came out. By this time the space was
brilliant with the confronted bodies of troops, those about to be
relieved of guard duty, and those come to relieve them, and our guide
got us excellent places where we could see everything and yet be out
of the wind which was beginning to blow cuttingly through the gates
and colonnades. There were all arms of the service--horse, foot, and
artillery; and the ceremony, with its pantomime and parley, was much
more impressive than the changing of the colors which I had once seen
at Buckingham Palace. The Spanish privates took the business not less
seriously than the British, and however they felt the Spanish officers
did not allow themselves to look bored. The marching and countermarching
was of a refined stateliness, as if the pace were not a goose step but
a peacock step; and the music was of an exquisitely plaintive and tender
note, which seemed to grieve rather than exult; I believe it was the
royal march which they were playing, but I am not versed in _such_
matters. Nothing could have been fitter than the quiet beauty of the
spectacle, opening through the westward colonnade to the hills and woods
of the royal demesne, with yellowing and embrowning trees that billowed
from distance to distance. Some day these groves and forests must be for
the people’s pleasure, as all royal belongings seem finally to be; and
in the mean time I did not grudge the landscape to the young king and
queen who probably would not have grudged it to me. Our guide valued
himself upon our admiration of it; without our special admiration he
valued himself upon the impressive buildings of the railway station
in the middle distance. I forget whether he followed us out of
the quadrangle into the roadway where we had the advantage of some
picturesque army wagons, and some wagoners in red-faced jackets and red
trousers, and top-boots with heavy fringes of leathern strings. Yet it
must have been he who made us aware of a high-walled inclosure where
soldiers found worthy of death by court martial could be conveniently
shot; though I think we discovered for ourselves the old woman curled up
out of the wind in a sentry-box, and sweetly asleep there while the boys
were playing marbles on the smooth ground before it. I must not omit the
peanut-boaster in front of the palace; it was in the figure of an ocean
steamer, nearly as large as the _Lusitania,_ and had smoke coming out
of the funnel, with rudder and screw complete and doll sailors climbing
over the rigging.

But it is impossible to speak adequately of the things in that wonderful
armory. If the reader has any pleasure in the harnesses of Spanish kings
and captains, from the great Charles the Fifth down through all the
Philips and the Charleses, he can glut it there. Their suits begin
almost with their steel baby clothes, and adapt themselves almost to
their senile decrepitude. There is the horse-litter in which the great
emperor was borne to battle, and there is the sword which Isabella the
great queen wore; and I liked looking at the lanterns and the flags of
the Turkish galleys from the mighty sea-fight cf Lepanto, and the many
other trophies won from the Turks. The pavilion of Fran

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/7430