Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

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

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

  IV

  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 i
n 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.