It was the last evening of Carnival. The same masks, the same yells, the
same mad rushes, the same bedlam of disguised humanity blowing about the
streets in the great gusts of mistral that seemed to make them dance like
dead leaves on an earth where all joy is watched by death.
It was exactly twelve months since that other carnival evening when I had
felt a little weary and a little lonely but at peace with all mankind.
It must have been—to a day or two. But on this evening it wasn’t merely
loneliness that I felt. I felt bereaved with a sense of a complete and
universal loss in which there was perhaps more resentment than mourning;
as if the world had not been taken away from me by an august decree but
filched from my innocence by an underhand fate at the very moment when it
had disclosed to my passion its warm and generous beauty. This
consciousness of universal loss had this advantage that it induced
something resembling a state of philosophic indifference. I walked up to
the railway station caring as little for the cold blasts of wind as
though I had been going to the scaffold. The delay of the train did not
irritate me in the least. I had finally made up my mind to write a
letter to Doña Rita; and this “honest fellow” for whom I was waiting
would take it to her. He would have no difficulty in Tolosa in finding
Madame de Lastaola. The General Headquarters, which was also a Court,
would be buzzing with comments on her presence. Most likely that “honest
fellow” was already known to Doña Rita. For all I knew he might have
been her discovery just as I was. Probably I, too, was regarded as an
“honest fellow” enough; but stupid—since it was clear that my luck was
not inexhaustible. I hoped that while carrying my letter the man would
not let himself be caught by some Alphonsist guerilla who would, of
course, shoot him. But why should he? I, for instance, had escaped with
my life from a much more dangerous enterprise than merely passing through
the frontier line in charge of some trustworthy guide. I pictured the
fellow to myself trudging over the stony slopes and scrambling down wild
ravines with my letter to Doña Rita in his pocket. It would be such a
letter of farewell as no lover had ever written, no woman in the world
had ever read, since the beginning of love on earth. It would be worthy
of the woman. No experience, no memories, no dead traditions of passion
or language would inspire it. She herself would be its sole inspiration.
She would see her own image in it as in a mirror; and perhaps then she
would understand what it was I was saying farewell to on the very
threshold of my life. A breath of vanity passed through my brain. A
letter as moving as her mere existence was moving would be something
unique. I regretted I was not a poet.
I woke up to a great noise of feet, a sudden influx of people through the
doors of the platform. I made out my man’s whiskers at once—not that
they were enormous, but because I had been warned beforehand of their
existence by the excellent Commissary General. At first I saw nothing of
him but his whiskers: they were black and cut somewhat in the shape of a
shark’s fin and so very fine that the least breath of air animated them
into a sort of playful restlessness. The man’s shoulders were hunched up
and when he had made his way clear of the throng of passengers I
perceived him as an unhappy and shivery being. Obviously he didn’t
expect to be met, because when I murmured an enquiring, “Señor Ortega?”
into his ear he swerved away from me and nearly dropped a little handbag
he was carrying. His complexion was uniformly pale, his mouth was red,
but not engaging. His social status was not very definite. He was
wearing a dark blue overcoat of no particular cut, his aspect had no
relief; yet those restless side-whiskers flanking his red mouth and the
suspicious expression of his black eyes made him noticeable. This I
regretted the more because I caught sight of two skulking fellows,
looking very much like policemen in plain clothes, watching us from a
corner of the great hall. I hurried my man into a fiacre. He had been
travelling from early morning on cross-country lines and after we got on
terms a little confessed to being very hungry and cold. His red lips
trembled and I noted an underhand, cynical curiosity when he had occasion
to raise his eyes to my face. I was in some doubt how to dispose of him
but as we rolled on at a jog trot I came to the conclusion that the best
thing to do would be to organize for him a shake-down in the studio.
Obscure lodging houses are precisely the places most looked after by the
police, and even the best hotels are bound to keep a register of
arrivals. I was very anxious that nothing should stop his projected
mission of courier to headquarters. As we passed various street corners
where the mistral blast struck at us fiercely I could feel him shivering
by my side. However, Therese would have lighted the iron stove in the
studio before retiring for the night, and, anyway, I would have to turn
her out to make up a bed on the couch. Service of the King! I must say
that she was amiable and didn’t seem to mind anything one asked her to
do. Thus while the fellow slumbered on the divan I would sit upstairs in
my room setting down on paper those great words of passion and sorrow
that seethed in my brain and even must have forced themselves in murmurs
on to my lips, because the man by my side suddenly asked me: “What did
you say?”—“Nothing,” I answered, very much surprised. In the shifting
light of the street lamps he looked the picture of bodily misery with his
chattering teeth and his whiskers blown back flat over his ears. But
somehow he didn’t arouse my compassion. He was swearing to himself, in
French and Spanish, and I tried to soothe him by the assurance that we
had not much farther to go. “I am starving,” he remarked acidly, and I
felt a little compunction. Clearly, the first thing to do was to feed
him. We were then entering the Cannebière and as I didn’t care to show
myself with him in the fashionable restaurant where a new face (and such
a face, too) would be remarked, I pulled up the fiacre at the door of the
Maison Dorée. That was more of a place of general resort where, in the
multitude of casual patrons, he would pass unnoticed.
For this last night of carnival the big house had decorated all its
balconies with rows of coloured paper lanterns right up to the roof. I
led the way to the grand salon, for as to private rooms they had been all
retained days before. There was a great crowd of people in costume, but
by a piece of good luck we managed to secure a little table in a corner.
The revellers, intent on their pleasure, paid no attention to us. Señor
Ortega trod on my heels and after sitting down opposite me threw an
ill-natured glance at the festive scene. It might have been about
half-past ten, then.
Two glasses of wine he drank one after another did not improve his
temper. He only ceased to shiver. After he had eaten something it must
have occurred to him that he had no reason to bear me a grudge and he
tried to assume a civil and even friendly manner. His mouth, however,
betrayed an abiding bitterness. I mean when he smiled. In repose it was
a very expressionless mouth, only it was too red to be altogether
ordinary. The whole of him was like that: the whiskers too black, the
hair too shiny, the forehead too white, the eyes too mobile; and he lent
you his attention with an air of eagerness which made you uncomfortable.
He seemed to expect you to give yourself away by some unconsidered word
that he would snap up with delight. It was that peculiarity that somehow
put me on my guard. I had no idea who I was facing across the table and
as a matter of fact I did not care. All my impressions were blurred; and
even the promptings of my instinct were the haziest thing imaginable.
Now and then I had acute hallucinations of a woman with an arrow of gold
in her hair. This caused alternate moments of exaltation and depression
from which I tried to take refuge in conversation; but Señor Ortega was
not stimulating. He was preoccupied with personal matters. When
suddenly he asked me whether I knew why he had been called away from his
work (he had been buying supplies from peasants somewhere in Central
France), I answered that I didn’t know what the reason was originally,
but I had an idea that the present intention was to make of him a
courier, bearing certain messages from Baron H. to the Quartel Real in
Tolosa.
He glared at me like a basilisk. “And why have I been met like this?” he
enquired with an air of being prepared to hear a lie.
I explained that it was the Baron’s wish, as a matter of prudence and to
avoid any possible trouble which might arise from enquiries by the
police.
He took it badly. “What nonsense.” He was—he said—an employé (for
several years) of Hernandez Brothers in Paris, an importing firm, and he
was travelling on their business—as he could prove. He dived into his
side pocket and produced a handful of folded papers of all sorts which he
plunged back again instantly.
And even then I didn’t know whom I had there, opposite me, busy now
devouring a slice of pâté de foie gras. Not in the least. It never
entered my head. How could it? The Rita that haunted me had no history;
she was but the principle of life charged with fatality. Her form was
only a mirage of desire decoying one step by step into despair.
Señor Ortega gulped down some more wine and suggested I should tell him
who I was. “It’s only right I should know,” he added.
This could not be gainsaid; and to a man connected with the Carlist
organization the shortest way was to introduce myself as that “Monsieur
George” of whom he had probably heard.
He leaned far over the table, till his very breast-bone was over the
edge, as though his eyes had been stilettos and he wanted to drive them
home into my brain. It was only much later that I understood how near
death I had been at that moment. But the knives on the tablecloth were
the usual restaurant knives with rounded ends and about as deadly as
pieces of hoop-iron. Perhaps in the very gust of his fury he remembered
what a French restaurant knife is like and something sane within him made
him give up the sudden project of cutting my heart out where I sat. For
it could have been nothing but a sudden impulse. His settled purpose was
quite other. It was not my heart that he was after. His fingers indeed
were groping amongst the knife handles by the side of his plate but what
captivated my attention for a moment were his red lips which were formed
into an odd, sly, insinuating smile. Heard! To be sure he had heard!
The chief of the great arms smuggling organization!
“Oh!” I said, “that’s giving me too much importance.” The person
responsible and whom I looked upon as chief of all the business was, as
he might have heard, too, a certain noble and loyal lady.
“I am as noble as she is,” he snapped peevishly, and I put him down at
once as a very offensive beast. “And as to being loyal, what is that?
It is being truthful! It is being faithful! I know all about her.”
I managed to preserve an air of perfect unconcern. He wasn’t a fellow to
whom one could talk of Doña Rita.
“You are a Basque,” I said.
He admitted rather contemptuously that he was a Basque and even then the
truth did not dawn upon me. I suppose that with the hidden egoism of a
lover I was thinking of myself, of myself alone in relation to Doña Rita,
not of Doña Rita herself. He, too, obviously. He said: “I am an
educated man, but I know her people, all peasants. There is a sister, an
uncle, a priest, a peasant, too, and perfectly unenlightened. One can’t
expect much from a priest (I am a free-thinker of course), but he is
really too bad, more like a brute beast. As to all her people, mostly
dead now, they never were of any account. There was a little land, but
they were always working on other people’s farms, a barefooted gang, a
starved lot. I ought to know because we are distant relations.
Twentieth cousins or something of the sort. Yes, I am related to that
most loyal lady. And what is she, after all, but a Parisian woman with
innumerable lovers, as I have been told.”
“I don’t think your information is very correct,” I said, affecting to
yawn slightly. “This is mere gossip of the gutter and I am surprised at
you, who really know nothing about it—”
But the disgusting animal had fallen into a brown study. The hair of his
very whiskers was perfectly still. I had now given up all idea of the
letter to Rita. Suddenly he spoke again:
“Women are the origin of all evil. One should never trust them. They
have no honour. No honour!” he repeated, striking his breast with his
closed fist on which the knuckles stood out very white. “I left my
village many years ago and of course I am perfectly satisfied with my
position and I don’t know why I should trouble my head about this loyal
lady. I suppose that’s the way women get on in the world.”
I felt convinced that he was no proper person to be a messenger to
headquarters. He struck me as altogether untrustworthy and perhaps not
quite sane. This was confirmed by him saying suddenly with no visible
connection and as if it had been forced from him by some agonizing
process: “I was a boy once,” and then stopping dead short with a smile.
He had a smile that frightened one by its association of malice and
anguish.
“Will you have anything more to eat?” I asked.
He declined dully. He had had enough. But he drained the last of a
bottle into his glass and accepted a cigar which I offered him. While he
was lighting it I had a sort of confused impression that he wasn’t such a
stranger to me as I had assumed he was; and yet, on the other hand, I was
perfectly certain I had never seen him before. Next moment I felt that I
could have knocked him down if he hadn’t looked so amazingly unhappy,
while he came out with the astounding question: “Señor, have you ever
been a lover in your young days?”
“What do you mean?” I asked. “How old do you think I am?”
“That’s true,” he said, gazing at me in a way in which the damned gaze
out of their cauldrons of boiling pitch at some soul walking scot free in
the place of torment. “It’s true, you don’t seem to have anything on
your mind.” He assumed an air of ease, throwing an arm over the back of
his chair and blowing the smoke through the gash of his twisted red
mouth. “Tell me,” he said, “between men, you know, has this—wonderful
celebrity—what does she call herself? How long has she been your
mistress?”
I reflected rapidly that if I knocked him over, chair and all, by a
sudden blow from the shoulder it would bring about infinite complications
beginning with a visit to the Commissaire de Police on night-duty, and
ending in God knows what scandal and disclosures of political kind;
because there was no telling what, or how much, this outrageous brute
might choose to say and how many people he might not involve in a most
undesirable publicity. He was smoking his cigar with a poignantly
mocking air and not even looking at me. One can’t hit like that a man
who isn’t even looking at one; and then, just as I was looking at him
swinging his leg with a caustic smile and stony eyes, I felt sorry for
the creature. It was only his body that was there in that chair. It was
manifest to me that his soul was absent in some hell of its own. At that
moment I attained the knowledge of who it was I had before me. This was
the man of whom both Doña Rita and Rose were so much afraid. It remained
then for me to look after him for the night and then arrange with Baron
H. that he should be sent away the very next day—and anywhere but to
Tolosa. Yes, evidently, I mustn’t lose sight of him. I proposed in the
calmest tone that we should go on where he could get his much-needed
rest. He rose with alacrity, picked up his little hand-bag, and, walking
out before me, no doubt looked a very ordinary person to all eyes but
mine. It was then past eleven, not much, because we had not been in that
restaurant quite an hour, but the routine of the town’s night-life being
upset during the Carnival the usual row of fiacres outside the Maison
Dorée was not there; in fact, there were very few carriages about.
Perhaps the coachmen had assumed Pierrot costumes and were rushing about
the streets on foot yelling with the rest of the population. “We will
have to walk,” I said after a while.—“Oh, yes, let us walk,” assented
Señor Ortega, “or I will be frozen here.” It was like a plaint of
unutterable wretchedness. I had a fancy that all his natural heat had
abandoned his limbs and gone to his brain. It was otherwise with me; my
head was cool but I didn’t find the night really so very cold. We
stepped out briskly side by side. My lucid thinking was, as it were,
enveloped by the wide shouting of the consecrated Carnival gaiety. I
have heard many noises since, but nothing that gave me such an intimate
impression of the savage instincts hidden in the breast of mankind; these
yells of festivity suggested agonizing fear, rage of murder, ferocity of
lust, and the irremediable joylessness of human condition: yet they were
emitted by people who were convinced that they were amusing themselves
supremely, traditionally, with the sanction of ages, with the approval of
their conscience—and no mistake about it whatever! Our appearance, the
soberness of our gait made us conspicuous. Once or twice, by common
inspiration, masks rushed forward and forming a circle danced round us
uttering discordant shouts of derision; for we were an outrage to the
peculiar proprieties of the hour, and besides we were obviously lonely
and defenceless. On those occasions there was nothing for it but to
stand still till the flurry was over. My companion, however, would stamp
his feet with rage, and I must admit that I myself regretted not having
provided for our wearing a couple of false noses, which would have been
enough to placate the just resentment of those people. We might have
also joined in the dance, but for some reason or other it didn’t occur to
us; and I heard once a high, clear woman’s voice stigmatizing us for a
“species of swelled heads” (_espèce d’enflés_). We proceeded sedately,
my companion muttered with rage, and I was able to resume my thinking.
It was based on the deep persuasion that the man at my side was insane
with quite another than Carnivalesque lunacy which comes on at one stated
time of the year. He was fundamentally mad, though not perhaps
completely; which of course made him all the greater, I won’t say danger
but, nuisance.
I remember once a young doctor expounding the theory that most
catastrophes in family circles, surprising episodes in public affairs and
disasters in private life, had their origin in the fact that the world
was full of half-mad people. He asserted that they were the real
majority. When asked whether he considered himself as belonging to the
majority, he said frankly that he didn’t think so; unless the folly of
voicing this view in a company, so utterly unable to appreciate all its
horror, could be regarded as the first symptom of his own fate. We
shouted down him and his theory, but there is no doubt that it had thrown
a chill on the gaiety of our gathering.
We had now entered a quieter quarter of the town and Señor Ortega had
ceased his muttering. For myself I had not the slightest doubt of my own
sanity. It was proved to me by the way I could apply my intelligence to
the problem of what was to be done with Señor Ortega. Generally, he was
unfit to be trusted with any mission whatever. The unstability of his
temper was sure to get him into a scrape. Of course carrying a letter to
Headquarters was not a very complicated matter; and as to that I would
have trusted willingly a properly trained dog. My private letter to Doña
Rita, the wonderful, the unique letter of farewell, I had given up for
the present. Naturally I thought of the Ortega problem mainly in the
terms of Doña Rita’s safety. Her image presided at every council, at
every conflict of my mind, and dominated every faculty of my senses. It
floated before my eyes, it touched my elbow, it guarded my right side and
my left side; my ears seemed to catch the sound of her footsteps behind
me, she enveloped me with passing whiffs of warmth and perfume, with
filmy touches of the hair on my face. She penetrated me, my head was
full of her . . . And his head, too, I thought suddenly with a side
glance at my companion. He walked quietly with hunched-up shoulders
carrying his little hand-bag and he looked the most commonplace figure
imaginable.
Yes. There was between us a most horrible fellowship; the association of
his crazy torture with the sublime suffering of my passion. We hadn’t
been a quarter of an hour together when that woman had surged up fatally
between us; between this miserable wretch and myself. We were haunted by
the same image. But I was sane! I was sane! Not because I was certain
that the fellow must not be allowed to go to Tolosa, but because I was
perfectly alive to the difficulty of stopping him from going there, since
the decision was absolutely in the hands of Baron H.
If I were to go early in the morning and tell that fat, bilious man:
“Look here, your Ortega’s mad,” he would certainly think at once that I
was, get very frightened, and . . . one couldn’t tell what course he
would take. He would eliminate me somehow out of the affair. And yet I
could not let the fellow proceed to where Doña Rita was, because,
obviously, he had been molesting her, had filled her with uneasiness and
even alarm, was an unhappy element and a disturbing influence in her
life—incredible as the thing appeared! I couldn’t let him go on to make
himself a worry and a nuisance, drive her out from a town in which she
wished to be (for whatever reason) and perhaps start some explosive
scandal. And that girl Rose seemed to fear something graver even than a
scandal. But if I were to explain the matter fully to H. he would simply
rejoice in his heart. Nothing would please him more than to have Doña
Rita driven out of Tolosa. What a relief from his anxieties (and his
wife’s, too); and if I were to go further, if I even went so far as to
hint at the fears which Rose had not been able to conceal from me, why
then—I went on thinking coldly with a stoical rejection of the most
elementary faith in mankind’s rectitude—why then, that accommodating
husband would simply let the ominous messenger have his chance. He would
see there only his natural anxieties being laid to rest for ever.
Horrible? Yes. But I could not take the risk. In a twelvemonth I had
travelled a long way in my mistrust of mankind.
We paced on steadily. I thought: “How on earth am I going to stop you?”
Had this arisen only a month before, when I had the means at hand and
Dominic to confide in, I would have simply kidnapped the fellow. A
little trip to sea would not have done Señor Ortega any harm; though no
doubt it would have been abhorrent to his feelings. But now I had not
the means. I couldn’t even tell where my poor Dominic was hiding his
diminished head.
Again I glanced at him sideways. I was the taller of the two and as it
happened I met in the light of the street lamp his own stealthy glance
directed up at me with an agonized expression, an expression that made me
fancy I could see the man’s very soul writhing in his body like an
impaled worm. In spite of my utter inexperience I had some notion of the
images that rushed into his mind at the sight of any man who had
approached Doña Rita. It was enough to awaken in any human being a
movement of horrified compassion; but my pity went out not to him but to
Doña Rita. It was for her that I felt sorry; I pitied her for having
that damned soul on her track. I pitied her with tenderness and
indignation, as if this had been both a danger and a dishonour.
I don’t mean to say that those thoughts passed through my head
consciously. I had only the resultant, settled feeling. I had, however,
a thought, too. It came on me suddenly, and I asked myself with rage and
astonishment: “Must I then kill that brute?” There didn’t seem to be any
alternative. Between him and Doña Rita I couldn’t hesitate. I believe I
gave a slight laugh of desperation. The suddenness of this sinister
conclusion had in it something comic and unbelievable. It loosened my
grip on my mental processes. A Latin tag came into my head about the
facile descent into the abyss. I marvelled at its aptness, and also that
it should have come to me so pat. But I believe now that it was
suggested simply by the actual declivity of the street of the Consuls
which lies on a gentle slope. We had just turned the corner. All the
houses were dark and in a perspective of complete solitude our two
shadows dodged and wheeled about our feet.
“Here we are,” I said.
He was an extraordinarily chilly devil. When we stopped I could hear his
teeth chattering again. I don’t know what came over me, I had a sort of
nervous fit, was incapable of finding my pockets, let alone the latchkey.
I had the illusion of a narrow streak of light on the wall of the house
as if it had been cracked. “I hope we will be able to get in,” I
murmured.
Señor Ortega stood waiting patiently with his handbag, like a rescued
wayfarer. “But you live in this house, don’t you?” he observed.
“No,” I said, without hesitation. I didn’t know how that man would
behave if he were aware that I was staying under the same roof. He was
half mad. He might want to talk all night, try crazily to invade my
privacy. How could I tell? Moreover, I wasn’t so sure that I would
remain in the house. I had some notion of going out again and walking up
and down the street of the Consuls till daylight. “No, an absent friend
lets me use . . . I had that latchkey this morning . . . Ah! here it is.”
I let him go in first. The sickly gas flame was there on duty,
undaunted, waiting for the end of the world to come and put it out. I
think that the black-and-white hall surprised Ortega. I had closed the
front door without noise and stood for a moment listening, while he
glanced about furtively. There were only two other doors in the hall,
right and left. Their panels of ebony were decorated with bronze
applications in the centre. The one on the left was of course Blunt’s
door. As the passage leading beyond it was dark at the further end I
took Señor Ortega by the hand and led him along, unresisting, like a
child. For some reason or other I moved on tip-toe and he followed my
example. The light and the warmth of the studio impressed him
favourably; he laid down his little bag, rubbed his hands together, and
produced a smile of satisfaction; but it was such a smile as a totally
ruined man would perhaps force on his lips, or a man condemned to a short
shrift by his doctor. I begged him to make himself at home and said that
I would go at once and hunt up the woman of the house who would make him
up a bed on the big couch there. He hardly listened to what I said.
What were all those things to him! He knew that his destiny was to sleep
on a bed of thorns, to feed on adders. But he tried to show a sort of
polite interest. He asked: “What is this place?”
“It used to belong to a painter,” I mumbled.
“Ah, your absent friend,” he said, making a wry mouth. “I detest all
those artists, and all those writers, and all politicos who are thieves;
and I would go even farther and higher, laying a curse on all idle lovers
of women. You think perhaps I am a Royalist? No. If there was anybody
in heaven or hell to pray to I would pray for a revolution—a red
revolution everywhere.”
“You astonish me,” I said, just to say something.
“No! But there are half a dozen people in the world with whom I would
like to settle accounts. One could shoot them like partridges and no
questions asked. That’s what revolution would mean to me.”
“It’s a beautifully simple view,” I said. “I imagine you are not the
only one who holds it; but I really must look after your comforts. You
mustn’t forget that we have to see Baron H. early to-morrow morning.”
And I went out quietly into the passage wondering in what part of the
house Therese had elected to sleep that night. But, lo and behold, when
I got to the foot of the stairs there was Therese coming down from the
upper regions in her nightgown, like a sleep-walker. However, it wasn’t
that, because, before I could exclaim, she vanished off the first floor
landing like a streak of white mist and without the slightest sound. Her
attire made it perfectly clear that she could not have heard us coming
in. In fact, she must have been certain that the house was empty,
because she was as well aware as myself that the Italian girls after
their work at the opera were going to a masked ball to dance for their
own amusement, attended of course by their conscientious father. But
what thought, need, or sudden impulse had driven Therese out of bed like
this was something I couldn’t conceive.
I didn’t call out after her. I felt sure that she would return. I went
up slowly to the first floor and met her coming down again, this time
carrying a lighted candle. She had managed to make herself presentable
in an extraordinarily short time.
“Oh, my dear young Monsieur, you have given me a fright.”
“Yes. And I nearly fainted, too,” I said. “You looked perfectly awful.
What’s the matter with you? Are you ill?”
She had lighted by then the gas on the landing and I must say that I had
never seen exactly that manner of face on her before. She wriggled,
confused and shifty-eyed, before me; but I ascribed this behaviour to her
shocked modesty and without troubling myself any more about her feelings
I informed her that there was a Carlist downstairs who must be put up for
the night. Most unexpectedly she betrayed a ridiculous consternation,
but only for a moment. Then she assumed at once that I would give him
hospitality upstairs where there was a camp-bedstead in my dressing-room.
I said:
“No. Give him a shake-down in the studio, where he is now. It’s warm in
there. And remember! I charge you strictly not to let him know that I
sleep in this house. In fact, I don’t know myself that I will; I have
certain matters to attend to this very night. You will also have to
serve him his coffee in the morning. I will take him away before ten
o’clock.”
All this seemed to impress her more than I had expected. As usual when
she felt curious, or in some other way excited, she assumed a saintly,
detached expression, and asked:
“The dear gentleman is your friend, I suppose?”
“I only know he is a Spaniard and a Carlist,” I said: “and that ought to
be enough for you.”
Instead of the usual effusive exclamations she murmured: “Dear me, dear
me,” and departed upstairs with the candle to get together a few blankets
and pillows, I suppose. As for me I walked quietly downstairs on my way
to the studio. I had a curious sensation that I was acting in a
preordained manner, that life was not at all what I had thought it to be,
or else that I had been altogether changed sometime during the day, and
that I was a different person from the man whom I remembered getting out
of my bed in the morning.
Also feelings had altered all their values. The words, too, had become
strange. It was only the inanimate surroundings that remained what they
had always been. For instance the studio. . . .
During my absence Señor Ortega had taken off his coat and I found him as
it were in the air, sitting in his shirt sleeves on a chair which he had
taken pains to place in the very middle of the floor. I repressed an
absurd impulse to walk round him as though he had been some sort of
exhibit. His hands were spread over his knees and he looked perfectly
insensible. I don’t mean strange, or ghastly, or wooden, but just
insensible—like an exhibit. And that effect persisted even after he
raised his black suspicious eyes to my face. He lowered them almost at
once. It was very mechanical. I gave him up and became rather concerned
about myself. My thought was that I had better get out of that before
any more queer notions came into my head. So I only remained long enough
to tell him that the woman of the house was bringing down some bedding
and that I hoped that he would have a good night’s rest. And directly I
spoke it struck me that this was the most extraordinary speech that ever
was addressed to a figure of that sort. He, however, did not seem
startled by it or moved in any way. He simply said:
“Thank you.”
In the darkest part of the long passage outside I met Therese with her
arms full of pillows and blankets.