To Be Sure,
His _Don Quixote_ Had Not Yet Appeared, Though He Is Said To Have
Finished The First Part
In that miserable abode in that vile region; but
he had written poems and plays, especially his most noble tragedy
Of
"Numancia," and he had held public employs and lived near enough to
courts to be at least in their cold shade. It is all very Spanish and
very strange, and perhaps the wonder should be that in this most
provincial of royal capitals, in a time devoted to the extirpation of
ideas, the fact that he was a poet and a scholar did not tell fatally
against him. In his declaration before the magistrates he says that his
literary reputation procured him the acquaintance of courtiers and
scholars, who visited him in that pitiable abode where the ladies of his
family cared for themselves and him with the help of one servant maid.
They had an upper floor of the house, which stands at the base of a
stone terrace dropping from the wide, dusty, fly-blown street, where I
stayed long enough to buy a melon (I was always buying a melon in Spain)
and put it into my cab before I descended the terrace to revere the
house of Cervantes on its own level. There was no mistaking it; there
was the bust and the inscription; but it was well I bought my melon
before I ventured upon this act of piety; I should not have had the
stomach for it afterward. I was not satisfied with the outside of the
house, but when I entered the open doorway, meaning to mount to the
upper floor, it was as if I were immediately blown into the street again
by the thick and noisome stench which filled the place from some
unmentionable if not unimaginable source.
It was like a filthy insult to the great presence whose sacred shrine
the house should have been religiously kept. But Cervantes dead was as
forgotten in Valladolid as Cervantes living had been. In some paroxysm
of civic pride the tablet had been set in the wall and then the house
abandoned to whatever might happen. I thought foul shame of Valladolid
for her neglect, and though she might have answered that her burden of
memories was more than she could bear, that she could not be forever
keeping her celebrity sweet, still I could have retorted, But Cervantes,
but Cervantes! There was only one Cervantes in the world and there never
would be another, and could not she watch over this poor once home of
his for his matchless sake? Then if Valladolid had come back at me with
the fact that Cervantes had lived pretty well all over Spain, and what
had Seville done, Cordova done, Toledo done, Madrid done, for the upkeep
of his divers sojourns more than she had done, after placing a tablet in
his house wall? - certainly I could have said that this did not excuse
her, but I must have owned that she was not alone, though she seemed
most to blame.
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