IX

[Illustration: 11 THE HOUSE IN WHICH PHILIP II. WAS BORN]

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.