"Do not ask me to watch her!"
"Why?"
"I could not support it."
"She is so bad as all that?"
"Bad? She is entrancing."
"Oh! Did you see her when you were in Spain?"
"In Paris, when I had come back. Have you read my _Sobs After
Midnight_?"
"No."
"Buy it. It contains perhaps the most poignant poems that I have
written--they are moans in metres for my loss of Pilar Naranjo."
"You don't say so?"
"She was the passion of my life." He struck an attitude. "Return to
your seat alone, mon ami. For company I shall have my bitter thoughts."
Civility forbade me to let him do all the acting, himself, and I said
in solemn tones, "I shall remain by your side."
He brooded heavily, with one eye on the past, and the other on the
effect he was making. "In my nature," he informed me, "there is,
mysteriously, some Castilian quality--no sooner had I arrived in Spain
than I bore myself like a Spaniard. I spent fascinating months there,
and when I came home, Paris appeared to me a foreign city. Absently I
replied to people in Spanish; my fondest possession was a guitar that
I had brought back. Though I could not play it, I derived exquisite
pleasure from slinging it over my shoulder when I promenaded in the
Garden of the Luxembourg. It may be that instinct warned my compatriots
that now they were alien to me, for they seemed to avoid me, and I was
alone."
"I can understand it," I said.
"One melancholy evening, as I wandered through the barren streets,
pining for the magic of Granada, I noticed the name of 'Pilar Naranjo'
on the bills of a minor musique 'all. Though it was a name unknown to
me, its nationality was an appeal. I entered the musique 'all. I paid
for a fauteuil, and received a pink ticket. What a crisis! Even to-day
I cannot behold pink tickets without a shudder."
To the strains of an exiguous orchestra, the provocation of the lady's
castanets reached our ears gaily. Her victim writhed.
* * * * *
"Very soon I gathered that she was popular there; but on the stage,
to be a foreigner is to be a favourite, and I prepared myself to be
disappointed when she appeared. Sapristi! I was spellbound. She danced,
that night, the _habenera_ that she is dancing now. Ah, those cajoling
arms, so irresistible! How imperial was her form, how Southern were her
feet! And her face! the bewildering beauty of her face that haunts me
still."