I Suppose We Were Then Led To The Sacrifice At The Several Side
Altars, But I Have No Specific Recollection Of Them; I Know There Was A
Pale, Sick-Looking Young Girl In White Who Went About With Her Father,
And Moved Compassion By Her Gentle Sorrowfulness.
Of the University, which we visited next, I recall only the baroque
facade; tha interior was in reparation and I do not know whether it
would have indemnified us for not visiting the University of Salamanca.
That was in our list, but the perversity of the time-table forbade.
You
could go to Salamanca, yes, but you could not come back except at two
o'clock in the morning; you could indeed continue on to Lisbon, but
perhaps you did not wish to see Lisbon. A like perversity of the
time-table, once universal in Spain, but now much reformed, also kept us
away from Segovia, which was on our list. But our knowledge of it
enabled us to tell a fellow-countrywoman whom we presently met in the
museum of the University, how she could best, or worst, get to that
city. Our speech gave us away to her, and she turned to us from the
other objects of interest to explain first that she was in a hotel where
she paid only six pesetas a day, but where she could get no English
explanation of the time-table for any money. She had come to Valladolid
with a friend who was going next day to Salamanca, but next day was
Sunday and she did not like to travel on Sunday, and Segovia seemed the
only alternative. We could not make out why, or if it came to that why
she should be traveling alone through Spain with such a slender
equipment of motive or object, but we perceived she was one of the most
estimable souls in the world, and if she cared more for getting to
Segovia that afternoon than for looking at the wonders of the place
where we were, we could not blame her. We had to leave her when we left
the museum in the charge of two custodians who led her, involuntary but
unresisting, to an upper chamber where there were some pictures which
she could care no more for than for the wood carvings below. We
ourselves cared so little for those pictures that we would not go to see
them. Pictures you can see anywhere, but not statuary of such singular
interest, such transcendant powerfulness as those carvings of Berruguete
and other masters less known, which held us fascinated in the lower
rooms of the museum. They are the spoil of convents in the region about,
suppressed by the government at different times, and collected here with
little relevancy to their original appeal. Some are Scriptural subjects
and some are figures of the dancers who take part in certain ceremonials
of the Spanish churches (notably the cathedral at Seville), which have a
quaint reality, an intense personal character. They are of a fascination
which I can hope to convey by no phrase of mine; but far beyond this is
the motionless force, the tremendous repose of the figures of the Roman
soldiers taken in the part of sleeping at the Tomb. These sculptures are
in wood, life-size, and painted in the colors of flesh and costume, with
every detail and of a strong mass in which the detail is lost and must
be found again by the wondering eye. Beyond all other Spanish sculptures
they seemed to me expressive of the national temperament; I thought no
other race could have produced them, and that in their return to the
Greek ideal of color in statuary they were ingenuously frank and
unsurpassably bold.
It might have been the exhaustion experienced from the encounter with
their strenuousness that suddenly fatigued us past even the thought of
doing any more of Valladolid on foot. At any rate, when we came out of
the museum we took refuge in a corner grocery (it seems the nature of
groceries to seek corners the world over) and asked the grocer where we
could find a cab.
The grocer was young and kind, and not so busy but he could give willing
attention to our case. He said he would send for a cab, and he called up
from his hands and knees a beautiful blond half-grown boy who was
scrubbing the floor, and despatched him on this errand, first making him
wipe the suds off his hands. The boy was back wonderfully soon to say
the cab would come for us in ten minutes, and to receive with
self-respectful appreciation the peseta which rewarded his promptness.
In the mean time we feigned a small need which we satisfied by a
purchase, and then the grocer put us chairs in front of his counter and
made us his guests while his other customers came and went. They came
oftener than they went, for our interest in them did not surpass their
interest in us. We felt that through this we reflected credit upon our
amiable host; rumors of the mysterious strangers apparently spread
through the neighborhood and the room was soon filled with people who
did not all come to buy; but those who did buy were the most,
interesting. An elderly man with his wife bought a large bottle which
the grocer put into one scale of his balance, and poured its weight in
chick-peas into the other. Then he filled the bottle with oil and
weighed it, and then he gave the peas along with it to his customers. It
seemed a pretty convention, though we could not quite make out its
meaning, unless the peas were bestowed as a sort of bonus; but the next
convention was clearer to us. An old man in black corduroy with a
clean-shaven face and a rather fierce, retired bull-fighter air, bought
a whole dried stock-fish (which the Spaniards eat instead of salt cod)
talking loudly to the grocer and at us while the grocer cut it across in
widths of two inches and folded it into a neat pocketful; then a glass
of wine was poured from a cask behind the counter, and the customer
drank it off in honor of the transaction with the effect also of
pledging us with his keen eyes; all the time he talked, and he was
joined in conversation by a very fat woman who studied us not unkindly.
Other neighbors who had gathered in had no apparent purpose but to
verify our outlandish presence and to hear my occasional Spanish, which
was worth hearing if for nothing but the effort it cost me.
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