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.
II
As soon as we had accepted our fate, while as yet the sun had not set
behind the clouds which had kept it out of our rooms all day, we hurried
out not only to escape the rigors of our hotel, but to see as soon as we
could, as much as we could of the famous city. We had got an excellent
cup of tea in the glass-roofed pavilion of our beautiful cold
dining-room, and now our spirits rose level with the opportunities of
the entrancing walk we took along the course of the Arlanson. I say
course, because that is the right word to use of a river, but really
there was no course in the Arlanzon. Between the fine, wide Embankments
and under the noble bridges there were smooth expanses of water
(naturally with women washing at them), which reflected like an
afterglow of the evening sky the splendid masses of yarn hung red from
the dyer's vats on the bank.
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