Our Driver Was Coldly Disgusted, But The Driver Of The
Ox-Team Preserved A Calm As Perfect As If He Had Been An Hidalgo
Interested By The Incident Before His Gate.
It delayed us till the
psychological moment when the funeral of the dean was over, and we could
join the formidable party following the sacristan from chapel to chapel
in the cathedral.
We came to an agonized consciousness of the misery of this progress in
the Chapel of the Constable, where it threatened to be finally stayed by
the indecision of certain ladies of our nation in choosing among the
postal cards for sale there. By this time we had suffered much from the
wonders of the cathedral. The sacristan had not spared us a jewel or a
silvered or gilded sacerdotal garment or any precious vessel of
ceremonial, so that our jaded wonder was inadequate to the demand of the
beautiful tombs of the Constable and his lady upon it. The coffer of the
Cid, fastened against the cathedral wall for a monument of his
shrewdness in doing the Jews of Burgos, who, with the characteristic
simplicity of their race, received it back full of sand and gravel in
payment of the gold they had lent him in it, could as little move us.
Perhaps if we could have believed that he finally did return the value
received, we might have marveled a little at it, but from what we knew
of the Cid this was not credible. We did what we could with the painted
wood carving of the cloister doors; the life-size head of a man with its
open mouth for a key-hole in another portal; a fearful silver-plated
chariot given by a rich blind woman for bearing the Host in the
procession of Corpus Christi; but it was very little, and I am not going
to share my failure with the reader by the vain rehearsal of its
details. No literary art has ever reported a sense of picture or
architecture or sculpture to me: the despised postal card is better for
that; and probably throughout these "trivial fond records" I shall be
found shirking as much as I may the details of such sights, seen or
unseen, as embitter the heart of travel with unavailing regret for the
impossibility of remembering them. I must leave for some visit of the
reader's own the large and little facts of the many chapels in the
cathedral at Burgos, and I will try to overwhelm him with my sense of
the whole mighty interior, the rich gloom, the Gothic exaltation, which
I made such shift as I could to feel in the company of those
picture-postal amateurs. It was like, say, a somber afternoon, verging
to the twilight of a cloudy sunset, so that when I came out of it into
the open noon it was like emerging into a clear morrow. Perhaps because
I could there shed the harassing human environment the outside of the
cathedral seemed to me the best of it, and we lingered there for a
moment in glad relief.
VII
One house in some forgotten square commemorates the state in which the
Castilian nobles used to live in Burgos before Toledo, and then
Valladolid, contested the primacy of the grim old capital of the
northern uplands. We stayed for a moment to glance from our carriage
through the open portal into its leafy _patio_ shivering in the cold,
and then we bade our guide hurry back with us to the hot luncheon which
would be the only heat in our hotel. But to reach this we had to pass
through another square, which we found full of peasants' ox-carts and
mule-teams; and there our guide instantly jumped down and entered into a
livelier quarrel with those peaceable men and women than I could
afterward have believed possible in Spain. I bade him get back to his
seat beside the driver, who was abetting him with an occasional guttural
and whom I bade turn round and go another way. I said that I had hired
this turnout, and I was master, and I would be obeyed; but it seemed
that I was wrong. My proud hirelings never left off their dispute till
somehow the ox-carts and mule-teams were jammed together, and a
thoroughfare found for us. Then it was explained that those peasants
were always blocking that square in that way and that I had, however
unwillingly, been discharging the duty of a public-spirited citizen in
compelling them to give way. I did not care for that; I prized far more
the quiet with which they had taken the whole affair. It was the first
exhibition of the national repose of manner which we were to see so
often again, south as well as north, and which I find it so beautiful to
have seen. In a Europe abounding in volcanic Italians, nervous Germans,
and exasperated Frenchmen, it was comforting, it was edifying to see
those Castilian peasants so self-respectfully self-possessed in the
wrong.
From time to time in the opener spaces we had got into the sun from the
chill shadow of the narrow streets, but now it began to be cloudy, and
when we re-entered our hotel it was almost as warm indoors as out. We
thought our landlord might have so far repented as to put on the steam;
but he had sternly adhered to his principle that the radiators were
enough of themselves; and after luncheon we had nothing for it but to go
away from Burgos, and take with us such scraps of impression as we
could. We decided that there was no street of gayer shops than those
gloomy ones we had chanced into here and there; I do not remember now
anything like a bookseller's or a milliner's or a draper's window. There
was no sign of fashion among the ladies of Burgos, so far as we could
distinguish them; there was not a glowering or perking hat, and I do not
believe there was a hobble-skirt in all the austere old capital except
such as some tourist wore; the black lace mantillas and the flowing
garments of other periods flitted by through the chill alleys and into
the dim doorways.
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