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.