It appears to be the use in most minor cities of Spain for the best
hotel to send the worst omnibus to the station, as who should say, “Good
wine needs no bush.” At Burgos we were almost alarmed by the shabbiness
of the omnibus for the hotel we had chosen through a consensus of praise
in the guide-books, and thought we must have got the wrong one. It was
indeed the wrong one, but because there is no right hotel in Burgos
when you arrive there on an afternoon of early October, and feel the
prophetic chill of that nine months of winter which is said to contrast
there with three months of hell.
I
The air of Burgos when it is not the breath of a furnace is so heavy and
clammy through the testimony of all comers that Burgos herself no longer
attempts to deny it from her high perch on the uplands of Old Castile.
Just when she ceased to deny it, I do not know, but probably when she
ceased to be the sole capital and metropolis of Christian Spain and
shared her primacy with Toledo sometime in the fourteenth century. Now,
in the twentieth, we asked nothing of her but two rooms in which we
could have fire, but the best hotel in Burgos openly declared that it
had not a fireplace in its whole extent, though there must have been one
in the kitchen. The landlord pointed out that it was completely equipped
with steam-heating apparatus, but when I made him observe that there was
no steam in the shining radiators, he owned with a shrug that there was
truth in what I said. He showed us large, pleasant rooms to the south
which would have been warm from the sun if the sun which we left playing
in San Sebastian had been working that day at Burgos; he showed us his
beautiful new dining-room, cold, with the same sunny exposure. I rashly
declared that all would not do, and that I would look elsewhere for
rooms with fireplaces. I had first to find a cab in order to find
the other hotels, but I found instead that in a city of thirty-eight
thousand inhabitants there was not one cab standing for hire in the
streets. I tried to enlist the sympathies of some private carriages, but
they remained indifferent, and I went back foiled, but not crushed,
to our hotel. There it seemed that the only vehicle to be had was the
omnibus which had brought us from the station. The landlord calmly (I
did not then perceive the irony of his calm) had the horses put to
and our baggage put on, and we drove away. But first we met our dear
Chilians coming to our hotel from the hotel they had chosen, and from a
search for hearthstones in others; and we drove to the only hotel they
had left unvisited. There at our demand for fires the landlord all but
laughed us to scorn; he laid his hand on the cold radiator in the
hotel as if to ask what better we could wish than that. We drove back,
humbled, to our own hotel, where the landlord met us with the Castilian
cairn he had kept at our departure. Then there was nothing for me but
to declare myself the Prodigal Son returned to take the rooms he
had offered us. We were so perfectly in his power that he could
magnanimously afford to offer us other rooms equally cold, but we did
not care to move. The Chilians had retired baffled to their own hotel,
and there was nothing for us but to accept the long evening of gelid
torpor which we foresaw must follow the effort of the soup and wine to
warm us at dinner. That night we heard through our closed doors agonized
voices which we knew to be the voices of despairing American women
wailing through the freezing corridors, “Can’t she understand that
I want _boiling_ water?” and, “Can’t’ we go down-stairs to a fire
somewhere?” We knew the one meant the chambermaid and the other the
kitchen, but apparently neither prayer was answered.
[Illustration: 04 GROUPS OF WOMEN ON THEIR KNEES BEATING CLOTHES IN THE WATER]