A Little Way Off The Avenue
Expanded Into A Fine Oblong Place, Where Some First Martyrs Of The
Inquisition Were Burned.
But the promenadefs 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.
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