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.