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.
CONTENTS
[ I. AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL APPROACHES ]
[ II. SAN SEBASTIAN AND BEAUTIFUL BISCAY ]
[ III. BURGOS AND THE BITTER COLD OF BURGOS ]
[ IV. THE VARIETY OF VALLADOLID ]
[ VI. A NIGHT AND DAY IN TOLEDO ]
[ VII. THE GREAT GRIDIRON OF ST. LAWRENCE ]
[ VIII. CORDOVA AND THE WAY THERE ]
[ X. SEVILLIAN ASPECTS AND INCIDENTS ]
[ XII. THE SURPRISES OF RONDA ]
[ XIII. ALGECIRAS AND TARIFA ]
ILLUSTRATIONS
[ 01 Puerta Del Sol—gate of the Sun—toledo ]
[ 02 The Casino, San Sebastian, Looks out Upon The Curving Concha and The Blue Bay ]
[ 03 The Sea Sweeps Inland in a Circle of Blue, to Form The Entrance To The Harbor, San Sebastian ]
[ 04 Groups of Women on Their Knees Beating Clothes in the Water ]
[ 05 The Iron-gray Bulk of The Cathedral Rears Itself from Clustering Walls and Roofs ]
[ 06 The Tomb of Donna Maria Manuel ]
[ 08 A Street Leading to the Cathedral ]
[ 09 The University of Valladolid ]
[ 11 The House in Which Philip Ii. Was Born ]
[ 13 Guard-mount in the Plaza de Armas, Royal Palace, Madrid ]
[ 14 Riches of Gray Roof and White Wall Mark Its Insurpassable Antiquity ]
[ 15 An Ancient Corner of the City ]
[ 16 The Bridge Across The Yellow Tagus ]
[ 17 The Town and Monastery of Escorial ]
[ 18 The Pantheon of The Kings and Queens Of Spain ]
[ 19 The Ancient City of Cordova ]
[ 20 The Bell-tower of The Great Mosque, Cordova ]
[ 21 Gateway of the Bridge, Cordova ]
[ 22 In Attitudes of Silent Devotion ]
[ 23 The Cathedral and Tower of The Giralda ]
[ 24 Ancient Roman Columns Lifting Aloft the Figures of Hercules and Caesar ]
[ 26 The Court of Flags and Tower Of The Giralda ]
[ 29 Looking Northwest from the Generalife over Granada ]
[ 30 Looking Across the New Bridge (300 Feet High) over The Guada-laviar Gorge, Ronda ]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 [ [!-- IMG --]
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.
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.
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 [ [!-- IMG --]
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.
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.
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.
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 Francis I. taken at Pavia was of no secondary interest, and everywhere was personal and national history told in the weapons and the armor of those who made the history. Perhaps some time the peoples will gather into museums the pens and pencils and chisels of authors and artists, and the old caps and gowns they wore, or the chairs they sat in at their work, or the pianos and violoncellos of famous musicians, or the planes of surpassing carpenters, or the hammers of eminent ironworkers; but these things will never be so picturesque as the equipments with which the military heroes saved their own lives or took others’. We who have never done either must not be unreasonable or impatient. It will be many a long century yet before we are appreciated at the value we now set upon ourselves. In the mean while we do not have such a bad time, and we are not so easily forgotten as some of those princes and warriors.
XI
One of the first errors of our search for the Archaeological Museum, promoted by the mistaken kindness of people we asked the way, found us in the Academy of Fine Arts, where in the company of a fat and flabby Rubens (Susanna, of course, and those filthy Elders) we chanced on a portrait of Goya by himself: a fine head most takingly shrewd. But there was another portrait by him, of the ridiculous Godoy, Prince of the Peace, a sort of handsome, foolish fleshy George Fourthish person looking his character and history: one of the most incredible parasites who ever fattened on a nation. This impossible creature, hated more than feared, and despised more than hated, who misruled a generous people for twenty-five years, throughout the most heroic period of their annals, the low-born paramour of their queen and the beloved friend of the king her husband, who honored and trusted him with the most pathetic single-hearted and simple-minded devotion, could not look all that he was and was not; but in this portrait by Goya he suggested his unutterable worthlessness: a worthlessness which you can only begin to realize by successively excluding all the virtues, and contrasting it with the sort of abandon of faith on the part of the king; this in the common imbecility, the triune madness of the strange group, has its sublimity. In the next room are two pieces of Goya’s which recall in their absolute realism another passage of Spanish history with unparalleled effect. They represent, one the accused heretics receiving sentence before a tribunal of the Inquisition, and the other the execution of the sentence, where the victims are mocked by a sort of fools’ caps inscribed with the terms of their accusal. Their faces are turned on the spectator, who may forget them if he can.
I had the help of a beautiful face there which Goya had also painted: the face of Moratin, the historian of the Spanish drama whose book had been one of the consolations of exile from Spain in my Ohio village. That fine countenance rapt me far from where I stood, to the village, with its long maple-shaded summer afternoons, and its long lamp-lit winter nights when I was trying to find my way through Moratin’s history of the Spanish drama, and somehow not altogether failing, so that fragments of the fact still hang about me. I wish now I could find the way back through it, or even to it, but between me and it there are so many forgotten passes that it would be hopeless trying. I can only remember the pride and joy of finding my way alone through it, and emerging from time to time into the light that glimmered before me. I cannot at all remember whether it was before or after exploring this history that I ventured upon the trackless waste of a volume of the dramatists themselves, where I faithfully began with the earliest and came down to those of the great age when Cervantes and Calderon and Lope de Vega were writing the plays. It was either my misfortune that I read Lope and not Calderon, or that I do not recall reading Calderon at all, and know him only by a charming little play of Madrid life given ten or fifteen years ago by the pupils of the Dramatic Academy in New York. My lasting ignorance of this master was not for want of knowing how great he was, especially from Lowell, who never failed to dwell on it when the talk was of Spanish literature. The fact is I did not get much pleasure out of Lope, but I did enjoy the great tragedy of Cervantes, and such of his comedies as I found in that massive volume.
I did not realize, however, till I saw that play of Calderon’s, in New York, how much the Spanish drama lias made Madrid its scene; and until one knows modern Spanish fiction one cannot know how essentially the incongruous city is the capital of the Spanish imagination. Of course the action of Gil Bias largely passes there, but Gil Blas in only adoptively a Spanish novel, and the native picaresque story is oftener at home in the provinces; but since Spanish fiction has come to full consciousness in the work of the modern masters it has resorted more and more to Madrid. If I speak only of Galdos and Valdes by name, it is because I know them best as the greatest of their time; but I fancy the allure of the capital has been felt by every other modern more or less; and if I were a Spanish author I should like to put a story there. If I were a Spaniard at all, I should like to live there a part of the year, or to come up for some sojourn, as the real Spaniards do. In such an event I should be able to tell the reader more about Madrid than I now know. I should not be poorly keeping to hotels and galleries and streets and the like surfaces of civilization; but should be saying all sorts of well-informed and surprising things about my fellow-citizens. As it is I have tried somewhat to say how I think they look to a stranger, and if it is not quite as they have looked to other strangers I do not insist upon my own stranger’s impression. There is a great choice of good books about Spain, so that I do not feel bound to add to them with anything like finality.
I have tried to give a sense of the grand-opera effect of the street scene, but I have record of only one passage such as one often sees in Italy where moments of the street are always waiting for transfer to the theater. A pair had posed themselves, across the way from our hotel, against the large closed shutter of a shop which made an admirable background. The woman in a black dress, with a red shawl over her shoulders, stood statuesquely immovable, confronting the middle-class man who, while people went and came about them, poured out his mind to her, with many frenzied gestures, but mostly using one hand for emphasis. He seemed to be telling something rather than asserting himself or accusing her; portraying a past fact or defining a situation; and she waited immovably silent till he had finished. Then she began and warmed to her work, but apparently without anger or prejudice. She talked herself out, as he had talked himself out. He waited and then he left her and crossed to the other corner. She called after him as he kept on down the street. She turned away, but stopped, and turned again and called after him till he passed from sight. Then she turned once more and went her own way. Nobody minded, any more than if they had been two unhappy ghosts invisibly and inaudibly quarreling, but I remained, and remain to this day, afflicted because of the mystery of their dispute.
We did not think there were so many boys, proportionately, or boys let loose, in Madrid as in the other towns we had seen, and we remarked to that sort of foreign sojourner who is so often met in strange cities that the children seemed like little men and women. “Yes,” he said, “the Spaniards are not children until they are thirty or forty, and then they never grow up.” It was perhaps too epigrammatic, but it may have caught at a fact. From another foreign sojourner I heard that the Catholicism of Spain, in spite of all newspaper appearances to the contrary and many bold novels, is still intense and unyieldingly repressive. But how far the severity of the church characterizes manners it would be hard to say. Perhaps these are often the effect of temperament. One heard more than one saw of the indifference of shop-keepers to shoppers in Madrid; in Andalusia, say especially in Seville, one saw nothing of it. But from the testimony of sufferers it appears to be the Madrid shop-keeper’s reasonable conception that if a customer comes to buy something it is because he, or more frequently she, wants it and is more concerned than himself in the transaction. He does not put himself about in serving her, and if she intimates that he is rudely indifferent, and that though she has often come to him before she will never come again, he remains tranquil. From experience I cannot say how true this is; but certainly I failed to awaken any lively emotion in the booksellers of whom I tried to buy some modern plays. It seemed to me that I was vexing them in the Oriental calm which they would have preferred to my money, or even my interest in the new Spanish drama. But in a shop where fans were sold, the shopman, taken in an unguarded moment, seemed really to enter into the spirit of our selection for friends at home; he even corrected my wrong accent in the Spanish word for fan, which was certainly going a great way.
XII
It was not the weather for fans in Madrid, where it rained that cold rain every afternoon, and once the whole of one day, and we could not reasonably expect to see fans in the hands of ladies in real life so much as in the pictures of ladies on the fans themselves. In fact, I suppose that to see the Madrilenas most in character one should see them in summer which in southern countries is the most characteristic season. Theophile Gautier was governed by this belief when he visited Spain in the hottest possible weather, and left for the lasting delight of the world the record of that Voyage en Espagne which he made seventy-two years ago. He then thought the men better dressed than the women at Madrid. Their boots are as “varnished, and they are gloved as white as possible. Their coats are correct and their trousers laudable; but the cravat is not of the same purity, and the waistcoat, that only part of modern dress where the fancy may play, is not always of irreproachable taste.” As to the women: “What we understand in France as the Spanish type does not exist in Spain... One imagines usually, when one says mantilla and senora, an oval, rather long and pale, with large dark eyes, surmounted with brows of velvet, a thin nose, a little arched, a mouth red as a pomegranate, and, above all, a tone warm and golden, justifying the verse of romance, She is yellow like an orange. This is the Arab or Moorish type and not the Spanish type. The Madrilenas are charming in the full acceptation of the word; out of four three will be pretty; but they do not answer at all to the idea we have of them. They are small, delicate, well formed, the foot narrow and the figure curved, the bust of a rich contour; but their skin is very white, the features delicate and mobile, the mouth heart-shaped and representing perfectly certain portraits of the Regency. Often they have fair hair, and you cannot take three turns in the Prado without meeting eight blonds of all shades, from the ashen blond to the most vehement red, the red of the beard of Charles V. It is a mistake to think there are no blonds in Spain. Blue eyes abound there, but they are not so much liked as the black.”
Is this a true picture of the actual Madrilenas? What I say is that seventy-two years have passed since it was painted and the originals have had time to change. What I say is that it was nearly always raining, and I could not be sure. What I say, above all, is that I am not a Frenchman of the high Romantic moment and that what I chiefly noticed was how beautiful the mantilla was whether worn by old or young, how fit, how gentle, how winning. I suppose that the women we saw walking in it were never of the highest class; who would be driving except when we saw them going to church. But they were often of the latest fashion, with their feet hobbled by the narrow skirts, of which they lost the last poignant effect by not having wide or high or slouch or swashbuckler hats on; they were not top-heavy. What seems certain is that the Spanish women are short and slight or short and fat. I find it recorded that when a young English couple came into the Royal Armory the girl looked impossibly tall and fair.
The women of the lower classes are commonly handsome and carry themselves finely; their heads are bare, even of mantillas, and their skirts are ample. When it did not rain they added to the gaiety of the streets, and when it did to their gloom. Wet or dry the streets were always thronged; nobody, apparently, stayed indoors who could go out, and after two days’ housing, even with a fire to air and warm our rooms, we did not wonder at the universal preference. As I have said, the noise that we heard in the streets was mainly the clatter of shoes and hoofs, but now and then there were street cries besides those I have noted. There was in particular a half-grown boy in our street who had a flat basket decorated with oysters at his feet, and for long hours of the day and dark he cried them incessantly. I do not know that he ever sold them or cared; his affair was to cry them.
VI. A NIGHT AND DAY IN TOLEDO
If you choose to make your visit to Toledo an episode of your stay in Madrid, you have still to choose between going at eight in the morning and arriving back at five in the evening, or going at five one evening and coming back at the same hour the next. In either case you will have two hours’ jolting each way over the roughest bit of railroad in the world, and if your mozo, before you could stop him, has selected for your going a compartment over the wheels, you can never be sure that he has done worse for you than you will have done for yourself when you come back in a compartment between the trucks. However you go or come, you remain in doubt whether you have been jolting over rails jointed at every yard, or getting on without any track over a cobble-stone pavement. Still, if the compartment is wide and well cushioned, as it is in Spain nearly always, with free play for your person between roof and floor and wall and wall; and if you go at five o’clock you have from your windows, as long as the afternoon light lasts, while you bound and rebound, glimpses of far-stretching wheat-fields, with nearer kitchen-gardens rich in beets and cabbages, alternating with purple and yellow patches of vineyard.
I
I find from my ever-faithful note-book that the landscape seemed to grow drearier as we got away from Madrid, but this may have been the effect of the waning day: a day which at its brightest had been dim from recurrent rain and incessant damp. The gloom was not relieved by the long stops at the frequent stations, though the stops were good for getting one’s breath, and for trying to plan greater control over one’s activities when the train should be going on again. The stations themselves were not so alluring that we were not willing to get away from them; and we were glad to get away from them by train, instead of by mule-team over the rainy levels to the towns that glimmered along the horizon two or three miles off. There had been nothing to lift the heart in the sight of two small boys ready perched on one horse, or of a priest difficultly mounting another in his long robe. At the only station which I can remember having any town about it a large number of our passengers left the train, and I realized that they were commuters like those who might have been leaving it at some soaking suburb of Long Island or New Jersey. In the sense of human brotherhood which the fact inspired I was not so lonely as I might have been, when we resumed our gloomy progress, with all that punctilio which custom demands of a Spanish way-train. First the station-master rings a bell of alarming note hanging on the wall, and the mozos run along the train shutting the car doors. After an interval some other official sounds a pocket whistle, and then there is still time for a belated passenger to find his car and scramble aboard. When the ensuing pause prolongs itself until you think the train has decided to remain all day, or all night, and several passengers have left it again, the locomotive rouses itself and utters a peremptory screech. This really means going, but your doubt has not been fully overcome when the wheels begin to bump under your compartment, and you set your teeth and clutch your seat, and otherwise prepare yourself for the renewal of your acrobatic feats. I may not get the order of the signals for departure just right, but I am sure of their number. Perhaps the Sud-Express starts with less, but the Sud-Express is partly French.
It had been raining intermittently all day; now that the weary old day was done the young night took up the work and vigorously devoted itself to a steady downpour which, when we reached our hotel in Toledo, had taken the role of a theatrical tempest, with sudden peals of thunder and long loud bellowing reverberations and blinding flashes of lightning, such as the wildest stage effects of the tempest in the Catskills when Rip Van Winkle is lost would have been nothing to. Foreboding the inner chill of a Spanish hotel on such a day, we had telegraphed for a fire in our rooms, and our eccentricity had been interpreted in spirit as well as in letter. It was not the habitual hotel omnibus which met us at the station, but a luxurious closed carriage commanded by an interpreter who intuitively opened our compartment door, and conveyed us dry and warm to our hotel, in every circumstance of tender regard for our comfort, during the slow, sidelong uphill climb to the city midst details of historic and romantic picturesqueness which the lightning momently flashed in sight. From our carriage we passed as in a dream between the dress-coated head waiter and the skull-capped landlord who silently and motionlessly received us in the Gothic doorway, and mounted by a stately stair from a beautiful glass-roofed patio, columned round with airy galleries, to the rooms from which a smoky warmth gushed out to welcome us.
The warmth was from the generous blaze kindled in the fireplace against our coming, and the smoke was from the crevices in a chimneypiece not sufficiently calked with newspapers to keep the smoke going up the flue. The fastidious may think this a defect in our perfect experience, but we would not have had it otherwise, if we could, and probably we could not. We easily assumed that we were in the palace of some haughty hidalgo, adapted to the uses of a modern hotel, with a magical prevision which need not include the accurate jointing of a chimneypiece. The storm bellowed and blazed outside, the rain strummed richly on the patio roof which the lightning illumined, and as we descended that stately stair, with its walls ramped and foliaged over with heraldic fauna and flora, I felt as never before the disadvantage of not being still fourteen years old.
But you cannot be of every age at once and it was no bad thing to be presently sitting down in my actual epoch at one of those excellent Spanish dinners which no European hotel can surpass and no American hotel can equal. It may seem a descent from the high horse, the winged steed of dreaming, to have been following those admirable courses with unflagging appetite, as it were on foot, but man born of woman is hungry after such a ride as ours from Madrid; and it was with no appreciable loss to our sense of enchantment that we presently learned from our host, waiting skull-capped in the patio, that we were in no real palace of an ancient hidalgo, but were housed as we found ourselves by the fancy of a rich nobleman of Toledo whom the whim had taken to equip his city with a hotel of poetic perfection. I am afraid I have forgotten his name; perhaps I should not have the right to parade it here if I remembered it; but I cannot help saluting him brother in imagination, and thanking him for one of the rarest pleasures that travel, even Spanish travel, has given me.
II
One must recall the effect of such a gentle fantasy as his with some such emotion as one recalls a pleasant tale unexpectedly told when one feared a repetition of stale commonplaces, and I now feel a pang of retroactive self-reproach for not spending the whole evening after dinner in reading up the story of that most storied city where this Spanish castle received us. What better could I have done in the smoky warmth of our hearth-fire than to con, by the light of the electric bulb dangling overhead, its annals in some such voluntarily quaint and unconsciously old-fashioned volume as Irving’s Legends of the Conquest of Spain; or to read in some such (if there is any such other) imperishably actual and unfadingly brilliant record of impressions as Gautier’s Voyage en Espagne, the miserably tragic tale of that poor, wicked, over-punished last of the Gothic kings, Don Roderick? It comes to much the same effect in both, and as I knew it already from the notes to Scott’s poem of Don Roderick, which I had read sixty years before in the loft of our log cabin (long before the era of my unguided Spanish studies), I found it better to go to bed after a day which had not been without its pains as well as pleasures. I could recall the story well enough for all purposes of the imagination as I found it in the fine print of those notes, and if I could believe the reader did not know it I would tell him now how this wretched Don Roderick betrayed the daughter of Count Julian whom her father had intrusted to him here in his capital of Toledo, when, with the rest of Spain, it had submitted to his rule. That was in the eighth century when the hearts of kings were more easily corrupted by power than perhaps in the twentieth; and it is possible that there was a good deal of politics mixed up with Count Julian’s passion for revenge on the king, when he invited the Moors to invade his native land and helped them overrun it. The conquest, let me remind the reader, was also abetted by the Jews who had been flourishing mightily under the Gothic anarchy, but whom Don Roderick had reduced to a choice between exile or slavery when he came to full power. Every one knows how in a few weeks the whole peninsula fell before the invaders. Toledo fell after the battle of Guadalete, where even the Bishop of Seville fought on their side, and Roderick was lastingly numbered among the missing, and was no doubt killed, as nothing has since been heard of him. It was not until nearly three hundred years afterward that the Christians recovered the city. By this time they were no longer Arians, but good Catholics; so good that Philip II. himself, one of the best of Catholics (as I have told), is said to have removed the capital to Madrid because he could not endure the still more scrupulous Catholicity of the Toledan Bishop.
Nobody is obliged to believe this, but I should be sorry if any reader of mine questioned the insurpassable antiquity of Toledo, as attested by a cloud of chroniclers. Theophile Gautier notes that “the most moderate place the epoch of its foundation before the Deluge,” and he does not see why they do not put the time “under the pre-Adamite kings, some years before the creation of the world. Some attribute the honor of laying its first stone to Jubal, others to the Greek; some to the Roman consuls Tolmor and Brutus; some to the Jews who entered Spain with Nebuchadnezzar, resting their theory on the etymology of Toledo, which comes from Toledoth, a Hebrew word signifying generations, because the Twelve Tribes had helped to build and people it.”
III
Even if the whole of this was not accurate, it offered such an embarrassing abundance to the choice that I am glad I knew little or nothing of the antagonistic origins when I opened my window to the sunny morning which smiled at the notion of the overnight tempest, and lighted all the landscape on that side of the hotel. The outlook was over vast plowed lands red as Virginia or New Jersey fields, stretching and billowing away from the yellow Tagus in the foreground to the mountain-walled horizon, with far stretches of forest in the middle distance. What riches of gray roof, of white wall, of glossy green, or embrowning foliage in the city gardens the prospect included, one should have the brush rather than the pen to suggest; or else one should have an inexhaustible ink-bottle with every color of the chromatic scale in it to pour the right tints. Mostly, however, I should say that the city of Toledo is of a mellow gray, and the country of Toledo a rich orange. Seen from any elevation the gray of the town made me think of Genoa; and if the reader’s knowledge does not enable him, to realize it from this association, he had better lose no time in going to Genoa.
I myself should prefer going again to Toledo, where we made only a day’s demand upon the city’s wealth of beauty when a lifetime would hardly have exhausted it. Yet I would not counsel any one to pass his whole life in Toledo unless he was sure he could bear the fullness of that beauty. Add insurpassable antiquity, add tragedy, add unendurable orthodoxy, add the pathos of hopeless decay, and I think I would rather give a day than a lifetime to Toledo. Or I would like to go back and give another day to it and come every year and give a day. This very moment, instead of writing of it in a high New York flat and looking out on a prospect incomparably sky-scrapered, I would rather be in that glass-roofed patio of our histrionic hotel, engaging the services of one of the most admirable guides who ever fell to the lot of mortal Americans, while much advised by our skull-capped landlord to shun the cicerone of another hotel as “an Italian man,” with little or no English.
As soon as we appeared outside the beggars of Toledo swarmed upon us; but I hope it was not from them I formed the notion that the beauty of the place was architectural and not personal, though these poor things were as deplorably plain as they were obviously miserable. The inhabitants who did not ask alms were of course in the majority, but neither were these impressive in looks or bearing. Rather, I should say, their average was small and dark, and in color of eyes and hair as well as skin they suggested the African race that held Toledo for four centuries. Neither here nor anywhere else in Spain are there any traces of the Jews who helped bring the Arabs in; once for all, that people have been banished so perfectly that they do not show their noses anywhere. Possibly they exist, but they do not exist openly, any more than the descendants of the Moorish invaders practise their Moslem rites. As for the beggars, to whom I return as they constantly returned to us, it did not avail to do them charity; that by no means dispersed them; the thronging misery and mutilation in the lame, the halt and the blind, was as great at our coming back to our hotel as our going out of it. They were of every age and sex; the very school-children left their sports to chance our charity; and it is still with a pang that I remember the little girl whom we denied a copper when she was really asking for a florecito out of the nosegay that one of us carried. But how could we know that it was a little flower and not a “little dog” she wanted?
There was something vividly spectacular in the square, by no means large, which we came into on turning the corner from our hotel. It was a sort of market-place as well as business place, and it looked as if it might be the resort at certain hours of the polite as well as the impolite leisure of a city of leisure not apparently overworked in any of its classes. But at ten o’clock in the morning it was empty enough, and after a small purchase at one of the shops we passed from it without elbowing or being elbowed, and found ourselves at the portal of that ancient posada where Cervantes is said to have once sojourned at least long enough to write one of his Exemplary Novels. He was of such a ubiquitous habit that if we had visited every city of Spain we should have found some witness of his stay, but I do not believe we could have found any more satisfactory than this. It is verified by a tablet in its outer wall, and within it is convincingly a posada of his time. It has a large low-vaulted interior, with the carts and wagons of the muleteers at the right of the entrance, and beyond these the stalls of the mules where they stood chewing their provender, and glancing uninterestedly round at the intruders, for plainly we were not of the guests who frequent the place. Such, for a chamber like those around and behind the stalls, on the same earthen level, pay five cents of our money a day; they supply their own bed and board and pay five cents more for the use of a fire.
Some guests were coming and going in the dim light of the cavernous spaces; others were squatting on the ground before their morning meal. An endearing smoke-browned wooden gallery went round three sides of the patio overhead; half-way to this at one side rose an immense earthen water jar, dim red; piles of straw mats, which were perhaps the bedding of the guests, heaped the ground or hung from the gallery; and the guests, among them a most beautiful youth, black as Africa, but of a Greek perfection of profile, regarded us with a friendly indifference that contrasted strikingly with the fixed stare of the bluish-gray hound beside one of the wagons. He had a human effect of having brushed his hair from his strange grave eyes, and of a sad, hopeless puzzle in the effort to make us out. If he was haunted by some inexplicable relation in me to the great author whose dog he undoubtedly had been in a retroactive incarnation, and was thinking to question me of that ever unfulfilled boyish self-promise of writing the life of Cervantes, I could as successfully have challenged him to say how and where in such a place as that an Exemplary Novelist could have written even the story of The Illustrious Scullion. But he seemed on reflection not to push the matter with me, and I left him still lost in his puzzle while I came away in mine. Whether Cervantes really wrote one of his tales there or not, it is certain that he could have exactly studied from that posada the setting of the scene for the episode of the enchanted castle in Don Quixote, where the knight suffered all the demoniacal torments which a jealous and infuriate muleteer knew how to inflict.
IV
Upon the whole I am not sure that I was more edified by the cathedral of Toledo, though I am afraid to own it, and must make haste to say that it is a cathedral surpassing in some things any other cathedral in Spain. Chiefly it surpasses them in the glory of that stupendous retablo which fills one whole end of the vast fane, and mounting from floor to roof, tells the Christian story with an ineffable fullness of dramatic detail, up to the tragic climax of the crucifixion, the Calvario, at the summit. Every fact of it fixes itself the more ineffaceably in the consciousness because of that cunningly studied increase in the stature of the actors, who always appear life-size in spite of their lift from level to level above the spectator. But what is the use, what is the use? Am I to abandon the young and younger wisdom with which I have refrained in so many books from attempting the portrayal of any Italian, any English church, and fall into the folly, now that I am old, of trying to say again in words what one of the greatest of Spanish churches says in form, in color? Let me rather turn from that vainest endeavor to the trivialities of sight-seeing which endear the memory of monuments and make the experience of them endurable. The beautiful choir, with its walls pierced in gigantic filigree, might have been art or not, as one chose, but the three young girls who smiled and whispered with the young man near it were nature, which there could be no two minds about. They were pathetically privileged there to a moment of the free interplay of youthful interests and emotions which the Spanish convention forbids less in the churches than anywhere else.
The Spanish religion is, in fact, kind to the young in many ways, and on our way to the cathedral we had paused at a shrine of the Virgin in appreciation of her friendly offices to poor girls wanting husbands; they have only to drop a pin inside the grating before her and draw a husband, tall for a large pin and short for a little one; or if they can make their offering in coin, their chances of marrying money are good. The Virgin is always ready to befriend her devotees, and in the cathedral near that beautiful choir screen she has a shrine above the stone where she alighted when she brought a chasuble to St. Ildefonso (she owed him something for his maintenance of her Immaculate Conception long before it was imagined a dogma) and left the print of her foot in the pavement. The fact is attested by the very simple yet absolute inscription:
Quando la Reina del Cielo
Puso los pies en el suelo,
En esta piedra los puso,
or as my English will have it:
When the Queen of Heaven put
Upon the earth her foot,
She put it on this stone
and left it indelible there, so that now if you thrust your finger through the grille and touch the place you get off three hundred years of purgatory: not much in the count of eternity, but still something.
We saw a woman and a priest touching it as we stood by and going away enviably comforted; but we were there as connoisseurs, not as votaries; and we were trying to be conscious solely of the surpassing grandeur and beauty of the cathedral. Here as elsewhere in Spain the passionate desire of the race to realize a fact in art expresses itself gloriously or grotesquely according to the occasion. The rear of the chorus is one vast riot of rococo sculpture, representing I do not know what mystical event; but down through the midst of the livingly studied performance a mighty angel comes plunging, with his fine legs following his torso through the air, like those of a diver taking a header into the water. Nothing less than the sublime touch of those legs would have satisfied the instinct from which and for which the artist worked; they gave reality to the affair in every part.
I wish I could give reality to every part of that most noble, that most lovably beautiful temple. We had only a poor half-hour for it, and we could not do more than flutter the pages of the epic it was and catch here and there a word, a phrase: a word writ in architecture or sculpture, a phrase richly expressed in gold and silver and precious marble, or painted in the dyes of the dawns and sunsets which used to lend themselves so much more willingly to the arts than they seem to do now. From our note-books I find that this cathedral of Toledo appeared more wonderful to one of us than the cathedral of Burgos; but who knows? It might have been that the day was warmer and brighter and had not yet shivered and saddened to the cold rain it ended in. At any rate the vast church filled itself more and more with the solemn glow in which we left it steeped when we went out and took our dreamway through the narrow, winding, wandering streets that seemed to lure us where they would. One of them climbed with us to the Alcazar, which is no longer any great thing to see in itself, but which opens a hospitable space within its court for a prospect of so much of the world around Toledo, the world of yellow river and red fields and blue mountains, and white-clouded azure sky, that we might well have mistaken it for the whole earth. In itself, as I say, the Alcazar is no great thing for where it is, but if we had here in New York an Alcazar that remembered historically back through French, English, Arabic, Gothic. Roman, and Carthaginian occupations to the inarticulate Iberian past we should come, I suppose, from far and near to visit it. Now, however, after gasping at its outlook, we left it hopelessly, and lost ourselves, except for our kindly guide, in the crooked little stony lanes, with the sun hot on our backs and the shade cool in our faces. There were Moorish bits and suggestions in the white walls and the low flat roofs of the houses, but these were not so jealous of their privacy as such houses were once meant to be. Through the gate of one we were led into a garden of simple flowers belted with a world-old parapet, over which we could look at a stretch of the Gothic wall of King Wamba’s time, before the miserable Roderick won and lost his kingdom. A pomegranate tree, red with fruit, overhung us, and from the borders of marigolds and zinnias and German clover the gray garden-wife gathered a nosegay for us. She said she was three duros and a half old, as who should say three dollars and a half, and she had a grim amusement in so translating her seventy years.
V
It was hard by her cottage that we saw our first mosque, which had begun by being a Gothic church, but had lost itself in paynim hands for centuries, in spite of the lamp always kept burning in it. Then one day the Cid came riding by, and his horse, at sight of a white stone in the street pavement, knelt down and would not budge till men came and dug through the wall of the mosque and disclosed this indefatigable lamp in the church. We expressed our doubt of the man’s knowing so unerringly that the horse meant them to dig through the mosque. “If you can believe the rest I think you can believe that,” our guide argued.
He was like so many taciturn Spaniards, not inconversable, and we had a pleasure in his unobtrusive intelligence which I should be sorry to exaggerate. He supplied us with such statistics of his city as we brought away with us, and as I think the reader may join me in trusting, and in regretting that I did not ask more. Still it is something to have learned that in Toledo now each family lives English fashion in a house of its own, while in the other continental cities it mostly dwells in a flat. This is because the population has fallen from two hundred thousand to twenty thousand, and the houses have not shared its decay, but remain habitable for numbers immensely beyond those of the households. In the summer the family inhabits the first floor which the patio and the subterranean damp from the rains keep cool; in the winter it retreats to the upper chambers which the sun is supposed to warm, and which are at any rate dry even on cloudy days. The rents would be thought low in New York: three dollars a month get a fair house in Toledo; but wages are low, too; three dollars a month for a manservant and a dollar and a half for a maid. If the Toledans from high to low are extravagant in anything it is dress, but dress for the outside, not the inside, which does not show, as our guide satirically explained. They scrimp themselves in food and they pay the penalty in lessened vitality; there is not so much fever as one might think; but there is a great deal of consumption; and as we could not help seeing everywhere in the streets there were many blind, who seemed oftenest to have suffered from smallpox. The beggars were not so well dressed as the other classes, but I saw no such delirious patchwork as at Burgos. On the other hand, there were no idle people who were fashionably dressed; no men or women who looked great-world.
Perhaps if the afternoon had kept the sunny promise of the forenoon they might have been driving in the Paseo, a promenade which Toledo has like every Spanish city; but it rained and we did not stop at the Paseo which looked so pleasant.
The city, as so many have told and as I hope the reader will imagine, is a network of winding and crooked lanes, which the books say are Moorish, but which are medieval like those of every old city. They nowhere lend themselves to walking for pleasure, and the houses do not open their patios to the passer with Andalusian expansiveness; they are in fact of a quite Oriental reserve. I remember no dwellings of the grade, quite, of hovels; but neither do there seem to be many palaces or palatial houses in my hurried impression. Whatever it may be industrially or ecclesiastically, Toledo is now socially provincial and tending to extinction. It is so near Madrid that if I myself were living in Toledo I would want to live in Madrid, and only return for brief sojourns to mourn my want of a serious object in life; at Toledo it must be easy to cherish such an object.
Industrially, of course, one associates it with the manufacture of the famous Toledo blades, which it is said are made as wonderful as ever, and I had a dim idea of getting a large one for decorative use in a New York flat. But the foundry is a mile out of town, and I only got so far as to look at the artists who engrave the smaller sort in shops open to the public eye; and my purpose dwindled to the purchase of a little pair of scissors, much as a high resolve for the famous marchpane of Toledo ended in a piece of that pastry about twice the size of a silver dollar. Not all of the twenty thousand people of Toledo could be engaged in these specialties, and I owe myself to blame for not asking more about the local industries; but it is not too late for the reader, whom I could do no greater favor than sending him there, to repair my deficiency. In self-defense I urge my knowledge of a military school in the Alcazar, where and in the street leading up to it we saw some companies of the comely and kindly-looking cadets. I know also that there are public night schools where those so minded may study the arts and letters, as our guide was doing in certain directions. Now that there are no longer any Jews in Toledo, and the Arabs to whom they betrayed the Gothic capital have all been Christians or exiles for many centuries, we felt that we represented the whole alien element of the place; there seemed to be at least no other visitors of our lineage or language.
VI
We were going to spend the rest of the day driving out through the city into the country beyond the Tagus, and we drove off in our really splendid turnout through swarms of beggars whose prayers our horses’ bells drowned when we left them to their despair at the hotel door. At the moment of course we believe that it was a purely dramatic misery which the wretched creatures represented; but sometimes I have since had moments of remorse in which I wish I had thrown big and little dogs broadcast among them. They could not all have been begging for the profit or pleasure of it; some of them were imaginably out of work and worthily ragged as I saw them, and hungry as I begin to fear them. I am glad now to think that many of them could not see with their poor blind eyes the face which I hardened against them, as we whirled away to the music of our horses’ bells.
The bells pretty well covered our horses from their necks to their haunches, a pair of gallant grays urged to their briskest pace by the driver whose short square face and humorous mouth and eyes were a joy whenever we caught a glimpse of them. He was one of those drivers who know everybody; he passed the time of day with all the men we met, and he had a joking compliment for all the women, who gladdened at sight of him from the thresholds where they sat sewing or knitting: such a driver as brings a gay world to home-keeping souls and leaves them with the feeling of having been in it. I would have given much more than I gave the beggars in Toledo to know just in what terms he and his universal acquaintance bantered each other; but the terms might sometimes have been rather rank. Something, at any rate, qualified the air, which I fancied softer than that of Madrid, with a faint recurrent odor, as if in testimony of the driver’s derivation from those old rancid Christians, as the Spaniards used to call them, whose lineage had never been crossed with Moorish blood. If it was merely something the carriage had acquired from the stable, still it was to be valued for its distinction in a country of many smells; and I would not have been without it.
When we crossed the Tagus by a bridge which a company of workmen willingly paused from mending to let us by, and remained standing absent-mindedly aside some time after we had passed, we found ourselves in a scene which I do not believe was ever surpassed for spectacularity in any theater. I hope this is not giving the notion of something fictitious in it; I only mean that here Nature was in one of her most dramatic moods. The yellow torrent swept through a deep gorge of red earth, which on the farther side climbed in precipitous banks, cleft by enormous fissures, or chasms rather, to the wide plateau where the gray city stood. The roofs of mellow tiles formed a succession of levels from which the irregular towers and pinnacles of the churches stamped themselves against a sky now filled with clouds, but in an air so clear that their beautiful irregularities and differences showed to one very noble effect. The city still looked the ancient capital of the two hundred thousand souls it once embraced, and in its stony repair there was no hint of decay.
On our right, the road mounted through country wild enough at times, but for the most part comparatively friendly, with moments of being almost homelike. There were slopes which, if massive always, were sometimes mild and were gray with immemorial olives. In certain orchard nooks there were apricot trees, yellowing to the autumn, with red-brown withered grasses tangling under them. Men were gathering the fruit of the abounding cactuses in places, and in one place a peasant was bearing an arm-load of them to a wide stone pen in the midst of which stood a lordly black pig, with head lifted and staring, indifferent to cactuses, toward Toledo. His statuesque pose was of a fine hauteur, and a more imaginative tourist than I might have fancied him lost in a dream of the past, piercing beyond the time of the Iberian autochtons to those prehistoric ages
When wild in woods the noble savage ran,
pursuing or pursued by his tusked and bristled ancestor, and then slowly reverting through the different invasions and civilizations to that signal moment when, after three hundred Moslem years, Toledo became Christian again forever, and pork resumed its primacy at the table. Dark, mysterious, fierce, the proud pig stood, a figure made for sculpture; and if he had been a lion, with the lion’s royal ideal of eating rather than feeding the human race, the reader would not have thought him unworthy of literature; I have seldom seen a lion that looked worthier of it.
We must have met farmer-folk, men and women, on our way and have seen their white houses farther or nearer. But mostly the landscape was lonely and at times nightmarish, as the Castilian landscape has a trick of being, and remanded us momently to the awful entourage of our run from Valladolid to Madrid. We were glad to get back to the Tagus, which if awful is not grisly, but wherever it rolls its yellow flood lends the landscape such a sublimity that it was no esthetic descent from the high perch of that proud pig to the mighty gorge through which, geologically long ago, the river had torn its way. When we drove back the bridge-menders stood aside for us while we were yet far off, and the women came to their doorways at the sound of our bells for another exchange of jokes with our driver. By the time a protracted file of mules had preceded us over the bridge, a brisk shower had come up, and after urging our grays at their topmost speed toward the famous church of San Juan de los Reyes Catolicos, we still had to run from our carriage door through the rain.
Happily the portal was in the keeping of one of those authorized beggars who guard the gates of heaven everywhere in that kind country, and he welcomed us so eagerly from the wet that I could not do less than give him a big dog at once. In a moment of confusion I turned about, and taking him for another beggar, I gave him another big dog; and when we came out of the church he had put off his cap and arranged so complete a disguise with the red handkerchief bravely tied round his head, that my innocence was again abused, and once more a big dog passed between us. But if the merit of the church might only be partially attributed to him, he was worth the whole three. The merit of the church was incalculable, for it was meant to be the sepulcher of the Catholic Kings, who were eventually more fitly buried in the cathedral at Granada, in the heart of their great conquest; and it is a most beautiful church, of a mingled Saracenic plateresque Gothic, as the guide-books remind me, and extravagantly baroque as I myself found it. I personally recall also a sense of chill obscurity and of an airy gallery wandering far aloof in the upper gloom, which remains overhead with me still, and the yet fainter sense of the balconies crowning like capitals the two pillars fronting the high altar. I am now sorry for our haste, but one has not so much time for enjoying such churches in their presence as for regretting them in their absence. One should live near them, and visit them daily, if one would feel their beauty in its recondite details; to have come three thousand miles for three minutes of them is no way of making that beauty part of one’s being, and I will not pretend that I did in this case. What I shall always maintain is that I had a living heartache from the sight of that space on the fagade of this church which is overhung with the chains of the Christian captives rescued from slavery among the Moors by the Catholic Kings in their conquest of Granada. They were not only the memorials of the most sorrowful fact, but they represented the misery of a thousand years of warfare in which the prisoners on either side suffered in chains for being Moslems or being Christians. The manacles and the fetters on the church front are merely decorative to the glance, but to the eye that reads deeper, how structural in their tale of man’s inhumanity to man! How heavily they had hung on weary limbs! How pitilessly they had eaten through bleeding ulcers to the bone! Yet they were very, very decorative, as the flowers are that bloom on battle-fields.
Even with only a few minutes of a scant quarter-hour to spare, I would not have any one miss seeing the cloister, from which the Catholic Kings used to enter the church by the gallery to those balcony capitals, but which the common American must now see by going outside the church. The cloister is turned to the uses of an industrial school, as we were glad to realize because our guide, whom we liked so much, was a night student there. It remains as beautiful and reverend as if it were of no secular use, full of gentle sculptures, with a garden in the middle, raised above the pavement with a border of thin tiles, and flower-pots standing on their coping, all in the shadow of tall trees, overhanging a deep secret-keeping well. From this place, where you will be partly sheltered from the rain, your next profitable sally through the storm will be to Santa Maria la Blanca, once the synagogue of the richest Jews of Toledo, but now turned church in spite of its high authorization as a place of Hebrew worship. It was permitted them to build it because they declared they were of that tribe of Israel which, when Caiaphas, the High Priest, sent round to the different tribes for their vote whether Jesus should live or die, alone voted that He should live. Their response, as Theophile Gautier reports from the chronicles, is preserved in the Vatican with a Latin version of the Hebrew text. The fable, if it is a fable, has its pathos; and I for one can only lament the religious zeal to which the preaching of a fanatical monk roused the Christian neighborhood in the fifteenth century, to such excess that these kind Jews were afterward forbidden their worship in the place. It is a very clean-looking, cold-looking white monument of the Catholic faith, with a retablo attributed to Berruguete, and much plateresque Gothic detail mingled with Byzantine ornament, and Moorish arabesquing and the famous stucco honeycombing which we were destined at Seville and Granada to find almost sickeningly sweet. Where the Rabbis read the law from their pulpit the high altar stands, and the pious populace has for three hundred years pushed the Jews from the surrounding streets, where they had so humbled their dwellings to the lowliest lest they should rouse the jealousy of their sleepless enemies.
VII
When we had visited this church there remained only the house of the painter known as El Greco, for whom we had formed such a distaste, because of the long features of the faces in his pictures, that our guide could hardly persuade us his house was worth seeing. Now I am glad he prevailed with us, for we have since come to find a peculiar charm in these long features and the characteristic coloring of El Greco’s pictures. The little house full of memorials and the little garden full of flowers, which ought to have been all forget-me-nots, were entirely delightful. As every one but I knew, and even I now know, he was born a Greek with the name of Theotocopuli, and studied tinder Titian till he found his account in a manner of his own, making long noses and long chins and high narrow foreheads in ashen gray, and at last went mad in the excess of his manner. The house has been restored by the Marquis de la Vega, according to his notion of an old Spanish house, and has the pleasantest small patio in the world, looked down into from a carved wooden gallery, with a pavement of red tiles interset with Moorish tiles of divers colors. There are interesting pictures everywhere, and on one wall the certificate of the owner’s membership in the Hispanic Society of America, which made me feel at home because it was signed with the name of an American friend of mine, who is repressed by prosperity from being known as a poet and one of the first Spanish scholars of any time.
The whole place is endearingly homelike and so genuinely hospitable that we almost sat down to luncheon in the kitchen with the young Spanish king who had lunched with the Marquis there a few weeks before. There was a veranda outside where we could linger till the rain held up, and look into the garden where the flowers ought to have been forget-me-nots, but were as usual mostly marigolds and zinnias. They crowded round tile-edged pools, and other flowers bloomed in pots on the coping of the garden-seats built up of thin tiles carved on their edges to an inward curve. It is strongly believed that there are several stories under the house, and the Marquis is going some day to dig them up or out to the last one where the original Jewish owner of the house is supposed to have hid his treasure. In the mean time we could look across the low wall that belted the garden in, to a vacant ground a little way off where some boys were playing with a wagon they had made. They had made it out of an oblong box, with wheels so rudely and imperfectly rounded, that they wabbled fearfully and at times gave way under the body; just as they did with the wagons that the boys I knew seventy years ago used to make.
I became so engrossed in the spectacle, so essentially a part of the drama, that I did not make due account of some particulars of the subterranean six stories of El Greco’s house. There must have been other things worth seeing in Toledo, thousands of others, and some others we saw, but most we missed, and many I do not remember. It was now coming the hour to leave Toledo, and we drove back to our enchanted castle for our bill, and for the omnibus to the station. I thought for some time that there was no charge for the fire, or even the smoke we had the night before, but my eyes were holden from the item which I found later, by seeing myself addressed as Milor. I had never been addressed as a lord in any bill before, but I reflected that in the proud old metropolis of the Goths I could not be saluted as less, and I gladly paid the bill, which observed a golden mean between cheapness and dearness, and we parted good friends with our host, and better with our guide, who at the last brought out an English book, given him by an English friend, about the English cathedrals. He was fine, and I could not wish any future traveler kinder fortune than to have his guidance in Toledo. Some day I am going back to profit more fully by it, and to repay him the various fees which he disbursed for me to different doorkeepers and custodians and which I forgot at parting and he was too delicate to remind me of.
When all leaves were taken and we were bowed out and away our horses, covered with bells, burst with the omnibus through a solid mass of beggars come to give us a last chance of meriting heaven by charity to them, and dashed down the hill to the station. There we sat a long half-hour in the wet evening air, wondering how we had been spared seeing those wretches trampled under our horses’ feet, or how the long train of goats climbing to the city to be milked escaped our wheels. But as we were guiltless of inflicting either disaster, we could watch with a good conscience the quiescent industry of some laborers in the brickyard beyond the track. Slowly and more slowly they worked, wearily, apathetically, fetching, carrying, in their divided skirts of cross-barred stuff of a rich Velasquez dirt color. One was especially worthy of admiration from his wide-brimmed black hat and his thoughtful indifference to his task, which was stacking up a sort of bundles of long grass; but I dare say he knew what it all meant. Throughout I was tormented by question of the precise co-racial quality of some English-speaking folk who had come to share our bone-breaking return to Madrid in the train so deliberately waiting there to begin afflicting us. English English they certainly were not; American English as little. If they were Australian English, why should not it have been a convention of polite travel for them to come up and say so, and save us that torment of curiosity? But perhaps they were not Australians.
VII. THE GREAT GRIDIRON OF ST. LAWRENCE
It seems a duty every Protestant owes his heresy to go and see how dismally the arch-enemy of heresy housed his true faith in the palace-tomb-and-church of the Escorial. If the more light-minded tourist shirks this act of piety, he makes a mistake which he will repent afterward in vain. The Escorial is, for its plainness, one of the two or three things worthiest seeing among the two or three hundred things worth seeing in Spain. Yet we feigned meaning to miss it after we returned to Madrid from Toledo, saying that everybody went to the Escorial and that it would be a proud distinction not to go. All the time we knew we should go, and we were not surprised when we were chosen by one of our few bright days for the excursion, though we were taken inordinately early, and might well have been started a little later.
I
Nothing was out of the common on the way to the station, and our sense of the ordinary was not relieved when we found ourselves in a car of the American open-saloon pattern, well filled with other Americans bent upon the same errand as ourselves; though I am bound to say that the backs of the transverse seats rose well toward the roof of the car with a certain originality.
When we cleared the city streets and houses, we began running out into the country through suburbs vulgarly gay with small, bright brick villas, so expressive of commuting that the eye required the vision of young husbands and fathers going in at the gates with gardening tools on their shoulders and under their arms. To be sure, the time of day and the time of year were against this; it was now morning and autumn, though there was a vernal brilliancy in the air; and the grass, flattered by the recent rains, was green where we had last seen it gray. Along a pretty stream, which, for all I know may have been the Manzanares, it was so little, files of Lombardy poplars followed away very agreeably golden in foliage; and scattered about were deciduous-looking evergreens which we questioned for live-oaks. We were going northward over the track which had brought us southward to Madrid two weeks before, and by and by the pleasant levels broke into rough hills and hollows, strewn with granite boulders which, as our train mounted, changed into the savage rock masses of New Castile, and as we drew near the village of Escorial gave the scene the look of that very desolate country. But it could not be so gloomy in the kind sunlight as it was when lashed by the savage storm which we had seen it cowering under before; and at the station we lost all feeling of friendlessness in the welcome of the thronging guides and hotel touters.
Our ideal was a carriage which we could keep throughout the day and use for our return to the train in the afternoon; and this was so exactly the ideal of a driver to whom we committed ourselves that we were somewhat surprised to have his vehicle develop into a motor-omnibus, and himself into a conductor.
When we arrived at the palace some miles off, up a winding way, he underwent another change, and became our guide to the Escorial. In the event he proved a very intelligent guide, as guides go, and I really cannot now see how we could have got on without him. He adapted the Spanish names of things to our English understanding by shortening them; a patio became a pat’, and an old master an old mast’; and an endearing quality was imparted to the grim memory of Philip II. by the diminutive of Philly. We accepted this, but even to have Charles V. brought nearer our hearts as Charley Fif, we could not bear to have our guide exposed to the mockery of less considerate travelers. I instructed him that the emperor’s name was Charles, and that only boys and very familiar friends of that name were called Charley among us. He thanked me, and at once spoke again of Charley Fif; which I afterward found was the universally accepted style of the great emperor among the guides of Spain. In vain I tried to persuade them out of it at Cordova, at Seville, at Granada, and wherever else they had to speak of an emperor whose memory really seems to pervade the whole land.
II
The genuine village of Escorial lies mostly to the left of the station, but the artificial town which grew up with the palace is to the right. Both are called after the slag of the iron-smelting works which were and are the vital industry of the first Escorial; but the road to the palace takes you far from the slag, with a much-hoteled and garden-walled dignity, to the plateau, apparently not altogether natural, where the massive triune edifice stands in the keeping of a throng of American women wondering how they are going to see it, and lunch, and get back to their train in time. Many were trying, the day of our visit, to see the place with no help but that of their bewildering Baedekers, and we had constant reason to be glad of our guide as we met or passed them in the measureless courts and endless corridors.
At this distance of time and place we seem to have hurried first to the gorgeous burial vault where the kings and queens of Spain lie, each one shut in a gilded marble sarcophagus in their several niches of the circular chamber, where under the high altar of the church they have the advantage of all the masses said above them. But on the way we must have passed through the church, immense, bare, cold, and sullener far than that sepulcher; and I am sure that we visited last of all the palace, where it is said the present young king comes so seldom and unwillingly, as if shrinking from the shelf appointed for him in that crypt shining with gold and polished marble.
It is of death, not life, that the Escorial preaches, and it was to eternal death, its pride and gloom, and not life everlasting, that the dark piety of Philip voluntarily, or involuntarily, consecrated the edifice. But it would be doing a wrong to one of the greatest achievements of the human will, if one dwelt too much, or too wholly, upon this gloomy ideal. The Escorial has been many times described; I myself forbear with difficulty the attempt to describe it, and I satisfy my longing to set it visibly before the reader by letting an earlier visitor of my name describe it for me. I think he does it larger justice than modern observers, because he escapes the cumulative obligation which time has laid upon them to find the subjective rather than the objective fulfilment of its founder’s intention in it. At any rate, in March, 1623, James Howell, waiting as secretary of the romantic mission the bursting of the iridescent love-dream which had brought Charles Stuart, Prince of Wales, from England to woo the sister of the Spanish king in Madrid, had leisure to write one of his most delightful “familiar letters” concerning the Escorial to a friend in London.
“I was yesterday at the Escorial to see the monastery of St. Lawrence, the eighth wonder of the world; and truly considering the site of the place, the state of the thing, the symmetry of the structure, with diverse other rareties, it may be called so; for what I have seen in Italy and other places are but baubles to it. It is built among a company of craggy hills, which makes the air the hungrier and wholesomer; it is all built of freestone and marble, and that with such solidity and moderate height that surely Philip the Second’s chief design was to make a sacrifice of it to eternity, and to contest with the meteors and time itself. It cost eight millions; it was twenty-four years abuilding, and the founder himself saw it furnished and enjoyed it twelve years after, and carried his bones himself thither to be buried. The reason that moved King Philip to waste so much treasure was a vow he had made at the battle of St. Quentin, where he was forced to batter a monastery of St. Lawrence friars, and if he had the victory he would erect such a monument to St. Lawrence that the world had not the like; therefore the form of it is like a gridiron, the handle is a huge royal palace, and the body a vast monastery or assembly of quadrangular cloisters, for there are as many as there be months of the year. There be a hundred monks, and every one hath his man and his mule, and a multitude of officers; besides there are three libraries there full of the choicest books for all sciences. It is beyond all expression what grots, gardens, walks, and aqueducts there are there, and what curious fountains in the upper cloisters, for there be two stages of cloisters. In fine, there is nothing that is vulgar there. To take a view of every room in the house one must make account to go ten miles; there is a vault called the Pantheon under the high altar, which is all paved, walled, and arched with marble; there be a number of huge silver candlesticks taller than I am; lamps three yards compass, and diverse chalices and crosses of massive gold; there is one choir made all of burnished brass; pictures and statues like giants; and a world of glorious things that purely ravished me. By this mighty monument it may be inferred that Philip the Second, though he was a little man, yet he had vast gigantic thoughts in him, to leave such a huge pile for posterity to gaze upon and admire in his memory.”
III
Perhaps this description is not very exact, but precision of statement is not to be expected of a Welshman; and if Howell preferred to say Philip built the place in fulfilment of that vow at the battle of St. Quentin, doubtless he believed it; many others did; it has only of late been discovered that Philip was not at St. Quentin, and did not “batter a monastery of St. Lawrence friars” there. I like to think the rest is all as Howell says down to the man and mule for every monk. If there are no men and mules left, there are very few monks either, after the many suppressions of convents. The gardens are there of an unquestionable symmetry and beauty, and the “company of craggy hills” abides all round the prodigious edifice, which is at once so prodigious, and grows larger upon you in the retrospect.
Now that I am this good distance away, and cannot bring myself to book by a second experience, I feel it safe to say that I had a feeling of St. Peter’s-like immensity in the church of the Escorial, with more than St. Peter’s-like bareness. The gray colorlessness of the architecture somberly prevails in memory over the frescoes of the painters invited to relieve it in the roof and the retablo, and thought turns from the red-and-yellow jasper of altar and pulpit, and the bronze-gilt effigies of kneeling kings and queens to that niche near the oratory where the little terrible man who imagined and realized it all used to steal in from his palace, and worship next the small chamber where at last he died. It is said he also read despatches and state papers in this nook, but doubtless only in the intervals of devotion.
Every one to his taste, even in matters of religion; Philip reared a temple to the life beyond this, and as if with the splendor of the mausoleum which it enshrines he hoped to overcome the victorious grave; the Caliph who built the mighty mosque at Cordova, which outlasts every other glory of his capital, dedicated it to the joy of this life as against the gloom of whose who would have put it under the feet of death. “Let us build,” he said to his people, “the Kaaba of the West upon the site of a Christian temple, which we will destroy, so that we may set forth how the Cross shall fall and become abased before the True Prophet. Allah will never place the world beneath the feet of those who make themselves the slaves of drink and sensuality while they preach penitence and the joys of chastity, and while extolling poverty enrich themselves to the loss of their neighbors. For these the sad and silent cloister; for us, the crystalline fountain and the shady grove; for them, the rude and unsocial life of dungeon-like strongholds; for us, the charm of social life and culture; for them, intolerance and tyranny; for us, a ruler who is our father; for them, the darkness of ignorance; for us, letters and instruction as wide-spread as our creed; for them, the wilderness, celibacy, and the doom of the false martyr; for us, plenty, love, brotherhood, and eternal joy.”
In spite of the somewhat vaunting spirit of his appeal, the wager of battle decided against the Arab; it was the Crescent that fell, the Cross that prevailed; in the very heart of Abderrahman’s mosque a Christian cathedral rises. Yet in the very heart of Philip’s temple to the spirit of the cloister, the desert, the martyrdom, one feels that a great deal could be said on Abderrahman’s side. This is a world which will not be renounced, in fact, and even in Christian Spain it has triumphed in the arts and sciences beyond its earlier victories in Moslem Spain. One finds Philip himself, with his despatches in that high nook, rather than among the bronze-gilt royalties at the high altar, though his statue is duly there with those of his three wives. The group does not include that poor Bloody Mary of England, who should have been the fourth there, for surely she suffered enough for his faith and him to be of his domestic circle forever.
IV
It is the distinct merit of the Escorial that it does not, and perhaps cannot take long in doing; otherwise the doer could not bear it. A look round the sumptuous burial chamber of the sovereigns below the high altar of the church; a glance at the lesser sepulchral glories of the infantes and infantas in their chapels and corridors, suffices for the funereal third of the trinity of tomb and temple and palace; and though there are gayer constituents of the last, especially the gallery of the chapter-house, with its surprisingly lively frescoes and its sometimes startling canvases, there is not much that need really keep you from the royal apartments which seem the natural end of your visit. Of these something better can be said than that they are no worse than most other royal apartments; our guide led us to them through many granite courts and corridors where we left groups of unguided Americans still maddening over their Baedekers; and we found them hung with pleasing tapestries, some after such designs of Goya’s as one finds in the basement of the Prado. The furniture was in certain rooms cheerily upholstered in crimson and salmon without sense of color, but as if seeking relief from the gray of the church; and there are battle-pieces on the walls, fights between Moors and Christians, which interested me. The dignified consideration of the custodian who showed us through the apartments seemed to have adapted to our station a manner left over from the infrequent presence of royalty; as I have said, the young king of Spain does not like coming to the Escorial.
I do not know why any one comes there, and I search my consciousness in vain for a better reason than the feeling that I must come, or would be sorrier if I did not than if I did. The worthy Howell does not commit himself to any expression of rejoicing or regretting in having done the Escorial. But the good Theophile Gautier, who visited the place more than two hundred years after, owns frankly that he is “excessively embarrassed in giving his opinion” of it. “So many people,” he says, “serious and well-conditioned, who, I prefer to think, have never seen it, have spoken of it as a chef d’oeuvre, and a supreme effort of the human spirit, so that I should have the air, poor devil of a facilletoniste errant, of wishing to play the original and taking pleasure in my contrary-mindedness; but still in my soul and conscience I cannot help finding the Escorial the most tiresome and the most stupid monument that could be imagined, for the mortification of his fellow-beings, by a morose monk and a suspicious tyrant. I know very well that the Escorial had a serious and religious aim; but gravity is not dryness, melancholy is not marasm, meditation is not ennui, and beauty of forms can always be happily wedded to elevation of ideas.” This is the Frenchman’s language as he goes into the Escorial; he does not cheer up as he passes through the place, and when he comes out he has to say: “I issued from that desert of granite, from that monkish necropolis with an extraordinary feeling of release, of exultation; it seemed to me I was born into life again, that I could be young once more, and rejoice in the creation of the good God, of which I had lost all hope in those funeral vaults. The bland and luminous air wrapt me round like a soft robe of fine wool, and warmed my body frozen in that cadaverous atmosphere; I was saved from that architectural nightmare, which I thought never would end. I advise people who are so fatuous as to pretend that they are ever bored to go and spend three or four days in the Escorial; they will learn what real ennui is and they will enjoy themselves all the rest of their lives in reflecting that they might be in the Escorial and that they are not.”
That was well toward a century ago. It is not quite like that now, but it is something like it; the human race has become inured to the Escorial; more tourists have visited the place and imaginably lightened its burden by sharing it among their increasing number. Still there is now and then one who is oppressed, crushed by it, and cannot relieve himself in such ironies as Gautier’s, but must cry aloud in suffering like that of the more emotional De Amicis: “You approach a courtyard and say, ‘I have seen this already.’ No. You are mistaken; it is another.... You ask the guide where the cloister is and he replies, ‘This is it,’ and you walk on for half an hour. You see the light of another world: you have never seen just such a light; is it the reflection from the stone, or does it come from the moon? No, it is daylight, but sadder than darkness. As you go on from corridor to corridor, from court to court, you look ahead with misgivings, expecting to see suddenly, as you turn a corner, a row of skeleton monks with hoods over their eyes and crosses in their hands; you think of Philip II.... You remember all that you have read about him, of his terrors and the Inquisition; and everything becomes clear to your mind’s eye with a sudden light; for the first time you understand it all; the Escorial is Philip II.... He is still there alive and terrible, with the image of his dreadful God... . Even now, after so long a time, on rainy days, when I am feeling sad, I think of the Escorial, and then look at the walls of my room and congratulate myself.... I see again the courtyards of the Escorial. ... I dream of wandering through the corridors alone in the dark, followed by the ghost of an old friar, crying and pounding at all the doors without finding a way of escape.”
I am of another race both from the Frenchman and the Italian, and I cannot pretend to their experiences, their inferences, and their conclusions; but I am not going to leave the Escorial to the reader without trying to make him feel that I too was terribly impressed by it. To be sure, I had some light moments in it, because when gloom goes too far it becomes ridiculous; and I did think the convent gardens as I saw them from the chapter-house window were beautiful, and the hills around majestic and serious, with no intention of falling upon my prostrate spirit. Yes, and after a lifelong abhorrence of that bleak king who founded the Escorial, I will own that I am, through pity, beginning to feel an affection for Philip II.; perhaps I was finally wrought upon by hearing him so endearingly called Philly by our guide.
Yet I will not say but I was glad to get out of the Escorial alive; and that I welcomed even the sulkiness of the landlord of the hotel where our guide took us for lunch. To this day I do not know why that landlord should have been so sour; his lunch was bad, but I paid his price without murmuring; and still at parting he could scarcely restrain his rage; the Escorial might have entered into his soul. On the way to his hotel the street was empty, but the house bubbled over with children who gaped giggling at his guests from the kitchen door, and were then apparently silenced with food, behind it. There were a great many flies in the hotel, and if I could remember its name I would warn the public against it.
After lunch our guide lapsed again to our conductor and reappeared with his motor-bus and took us to the station, where he overcame the scruples of the lady in the ticket-office concerning our wish to return to Madrid by the Sud-Express instead of the ordinary train. The trouble was about the supplementary fare which we easily paid on board; in fact, there is never any difficulty in paying a supplementary fare in Spain; the authorities meet you quite half-way. But we were nervous because we had already suffered from the delays of people at the last hotel where our motor-bus stopped to take up passengers; they lingered so long over lunch that we were sure we should miss the Sud-Express, and we did not see how we could live in Escorial till the way-train started; yet for all their delays we reached the station in time and more. The train seemed strangely reduced in the number of its cars, but we confidently started with others to board the nearest of them; there we were waved violently away, and bidden get into the dining-car at the rear of the train. In some dudgeon we obeyed, but we were glad to get away from Escorial on any terms, and the dining-car was not bad, though it had a somewhat disheveled air. We could only suppose that all the places in the two other cars were taken, and we resigned ourselves to choosing the least coffee-stained of the coffee-stained tables and ordered more coffee at it. The waiter brought it as promptly as the conductor collected our supplementary fare; he even made a feint of removing the stains from our table-cloth with a flourish of his napkin, and then he left us to our conjectures and reflections till he came for his pay and his fee just before we ran into Madrid.
VI
The mystery persisted and it was only when our train paused in the station that it was solved. There, as we got out of our car, we perceived that a broad red velvet carpet was laid from the car in front into the station; a red carpet such as is used to keep the feet of distinguished persons from their native earth the world over, but more especially in Europe. Along this carpet were loosely grouped a number of solemnly smiling gentlemen in frock-coats with their top-hats genteelly resting in the hollows of their left arms, and without and beyond the station in the space usually filled by closed and open cabs was a swarm of automobiles. Then while our spirits were keyed to the highest pitch, the Queen of Spain descended from the train, wearing a long black satin cloak and a large black hat, very blond and beautiful beyond the report of her pictures. By each hand she led one of her two pretty boys, Don Jaime, the Prince of Asturias, heir apparent, and his younger brother. She walked swiftly, with glad, kind looks around, and her ladies followed her according to their state; then ushered and followed by the gentlemen assembled to receive them, they mounted to their motors and whirred away like so many persons of a histrionic pageant: not least impressive, the court attendants filled a stage drawn by six mules, and clattered after.