I
"Don Rafael, the gentlemen of the Committee on the Budget are waiting
for you in the second section."
"I'll be there directly."
And the deputy bent low over his desk in the writing-room of the
Congress, went on with his last letter, adding one more envelope to the
heap of correspondence piled up at the end of the table, near his cane
and his silk hat.
This was his daily grind, the boresome drudgery of every afternoon; and
around him, with similar expressions of disgust on their faces, a large
number of the country's representatives were busy at the same task.
Rafael was answering petitions and queries, stifling the complaints and
acknowledging the wild suggestions that came in from the District--the
endless clamor of the voters at home, who never met the slightest
annoyance in their various paths of life without at once running to
their deputy, the way a pious worshipper appeals to the miracle-working
saint.
He gathered up his letters, gave them to an usher to mail, and
sauntering off with a counterfeit sprightliness that was more
counterfeit as he grew fatter and fatter with the years, walked through
to the central corridor, a prolongation of the lobby in front of the
_Salón de Conferencias_.
The Honorable señor don Rafael Brull, member from Alcira, felt as much
at ease as if he were in his own house when he entered that corridor,--a
dark hole, thick with tobacco smoke, and peopled with black suits
standing around in groups or laboriously elbowing their way through the
crowds.
He had been there eight years; though he had almost lost count of the
times he had been "duly elected" in the capricious ups and downs of
Spanish politics, which give to Parliaments only a fleeting existence.
The ushers, the personnel of the Secretariat, the guards and janitors,
treated him with deferential intimacy, as a comrade on a somewhat higher
level, but as much of a fixture as they were to the Spanish Congress. He
was not one of those men who are miraculously washed into office on the
crest of a reform wave, but never succeed in repeating the trick, and
spend the rest of their lives idling on the sofas of the Conference
Chamber, with wistful memories of lost greatness, waiting to enter
Congress afternoons, to preserve their standing as ex-deputies, and
forever hoping that their party will some day return to power, so that
once again they may sit on the red benches. No, don Rafael Brull was a
gentleman with a District all his own: he came with a clean, undisputed
and indisputable certificate of election, whether his own party or the
Opposition were in the saddle. For lack of other discoverable merit in
him, his fellow-partisans would say: "Brull is one of the few who come
here on honest returns." His name did not figure brilliantly in the
Congressional record, but there was not an employee, not a journalist,
not a member of the "ex-honorables" who, on noticing the word "Brull" on
all the committees, did not at once exclaim: "Ah, yes! Brull ... of
Alcira."
Eight years of "service to the country." Eight years of lodging-house
life, while yonder lay a sumptuous home adorned with a luxuriousness
that had cost his mother and his father-in-law half a fortune! Long
seasons of separation from his wife and his children--and without
amusements, to avoid spending money lest the folks at home suspect him
of dereliction in public--and private--duty! What a dog's life his eight
years as deputy had been! Indigestion from the countless gallons of
sugared water drunk at the Congressional bar; callouses on his feet from
endless promenades along the central corridor, absentmindedly knocking
the varnish off the tiles of the wainscoating with the tip of his cane;
an incalculable quantity of _pesetas_ spent on carriages, through fault
of his supporters, who sent him trotting every morning from one Ministry
to the next, asking for the earth, and getting a grain of sand!
He had not as yet gotten anywhere in particular; but according to
Chamber gossip he was a "serious" well-balanced young man, of few words,
but good ones, and sure some day to be rewarded with a Portfolio.
Content with the rôle of safety and sanity that had been assigned to
him, he laughed very seldom, and dressed soberly, with not a dissonant
color to brighten his black attire. He would listen patiently to things
that did not concern him in the least, rather than venture a personal
opinion with the chance of going wrong--satisfied with premature
wrinkles, premature corpulency, and premature baldness, since nothing
could be more respectable than a thoughtful face, a conspicuous paunch,
and a pate that could shine with venerable brilliancy under the lamps of
the Chamber. At thirty-four, he looked more like forty-five. When he
spoke he would remove his spectacles with a gesture he had carefully
imitated from the deceased leader of "the Party." He would never take
the floor without prefacing his remarks with: "My understanding is ...,"
or "I have my own humble opinion on this matter...." And this was what
don Rafael Brull had learned in eight years of parliamentary assiduity!
The new Conservative leader, seeing that he could always depend on
Brull's vote and that Alcira elections cost "the Party" nothing, had a
certain consideration for Rafael. He was a soldier always on hand for
roll-call, whenever a new Parliament was formed. He would present
himself with his certificate of election, whether his party, with all
the insolence of victory, occupied the benches on the Right, or hungry
and defiant, and reduced in numbers, was huddled on the Left, determined
to find fault with everything the reigning Ministry did. Two sessions as
part of the minority had won him a certain intimacy with the leader in
that frank comradeship that Oppositions always have, since, from leader
down to the most silent member, all the deputies "out of power" are on a
level. Besides, in those two seasons of misfortune, to aid in the
destructive tactics of his faction, he put little interpellations to the
government, at the openings of the sessions when the crowds were small;
and more than once he heard from the pale smiling lips of the chief:
"Very good, Brull; that was to the point." And such congratulations
were duly echoed in his home city, where rustic imagination did the
rest.
In addition, a few parliamentary honors had come his way; the "Grand
Cross" had been given him, as it is given to most deputies of a certain
length of service--from membership, eventually, on committees charged
with representing the legislative branch of the government at formal
public functions. If an "Answer to the Message" was to be taken "to the
Palace," he was one of those chosen for the purpose; and he trembled
with emotion to think of what his mother, his wife, all the people down
yonder at home would say if they could see him riding there in the
sumptuous carriage of state, preceded by bright-liveried horsemen and
saluted by trumpets blaring the royal march! He was also usually among
the delegates who came out on the staircase of the Congress to welcome
Their Majesties on the opening of a parliament. Finally, for one
session, he was on "the Committee for the Interior," an appointment that
raised his prestige a thousand percent among the ushers.
"That fellow Brull," they would say in the Chamber, "will be somebody
the day his party returns to power."
Well, now "the Party" was in power again. During one of those ordered,
calculated "changes of direction" to which Spain lives subject, because
of its parliamentary system of party weights and party balances, the
Conservatives captured the premiership; and Rafael went on the budget
committee. There he would do something more than make interpellations
when he opened his mouth to speak. In fact he had to win his spurs,
justify his filling one of those posts which, according to report, his
chief was holding for him.
The green deputies, the younger set constituting the new majority, elect
and triumphant through grace of the Ministry of the Interior, respected
him and deferred to what he said, much as students listen to a tutor who
they know receives his orders from the master directly--the
subordination of freshmen, as it were, to the sophomore who knows the
rules.
Whenever a vote was being taken and the Opposition was excited over the
chance of putting the government in the minority, the Premier would look
about anxiously over the hall for Brull.
"See here, Brull, better bring your people in; we're going to have a
close call."
And Brull, proud at being noticed thus, would dash out like a streak of
lightning while the bells were ringing and the ushers were running about
summoning the deputies to vote. He would make the rounds of the desks in
the writing rooms, elbow his way into groups in the corridors; and
filling with self-importance because of the authority conferred upon
him, he would rudely shoo the ministerial flock off toward the Chamber,
grumbling fogeywise and assuring them that "in his time," when he was
serving his first term, there was "far better discipline." When the vote
was all in and the victory won, he would sigh with satisfaction. He had
saved the government! And perhaps the nation!
At times a residue of the sincerity and frankness of his character as a
boy would rise to the surface in him. Then cruel doubts would assail his
faith in himself. Weren't they all playing a stupid comedy there
without the slightest wit or sense in it? Really was what they said and
did there of the slightest importance to the country--to anybody?
Standing in the corridor, he would feel the nervous flutter of the
journalists about him--those poor, intelligent, attractive, young
fellows, who found it so hard to make a living. From the press-gallery
they would sit and look down on the legislators the way birds in the
treetops must look down on the wretchedness of the streets below,
laughing at the nonsense those solemn baldpates were talking! Could a
farce on the stage be more amusing?
To Rafael those "intellectuals" seemed to bring a breeze from out of
doors into the close, sordid, vitiated air of the Chamber. They stood
for the thought of the world outside--the idea fatherless, unsponsored,
the aspiration of the great masses--a breath of fresh air in the
sick-room of a chronic invalid forever dying, forever unburiable.
Their judgment always differed from that of the country's
representatives. His Excellency señor don What's-his-Name was in their
eyes, a mud-eel, and in their lingo a _congrio_; the illustrious orator
What-do-you-call-him, who took up a sixteen-page sheet in the
Congressional Record every time he spoke, was a _percebe_, a "barnacle
on the keel of Progress"; every act of parliament struck them as a bit
of balderdash, though, to hold their jobs, they praised it to the skies
in their articles. And why was it that the country, in some mysterious
way, would always think eventually what those boys thought, so long, and
only so long, as they remained boys? Would they have to come down from
their scats in the press-gallery to the red benches on the floor before
the real will of the country would make itself felt?
Rafael Brull finally realized that national opinion was present on the
floor, among his fellow members, also, but like a mummy in a
sarcophagus: bound hand and foot in rhetoric and conventional utterance,
spiced, embalmed with proprieties that made any outburst of sincerity,
any explosion of real feeling, evidence of "bad taste!"
In reality everything was going well with the Ship of State. The nation
had passed from action to talk, and from talk to passivity, and from
passivity to resignation. The era of revolutions was gone forever. The
infallible system of government had proved to be this mechanism of
pre-arranged "crises" and amicable exchanges of patronage between
Liberals and Conservatives, each member of the party in power and each
member of the party out of power knowing just what he was to say and
just what he was to get.
So, in that palace of over-ornate architecture, as pretentious and as
showy as the mansion of a millionaire _parvenu_, Rafael was condemned to
spend his lifetime, foregoing the blue sky and the flowering fields and
orchards of Alcira that a family ambition might be realized.
Nothing noteworthy had occurred during those eight years. His life had
been a muddy, monotonous stream, with neither brilliancy nor beauty in
its waters, lazily meandering along, like the Júcar in winter. As he
looked back over his career as a "personage," he could have summed it up
in three words: he had married.
Remedios was his wife. Don Matias was his father-in-law. He was
wealthy. He had control over a vast fortune, for he exercised despotic
rule over his wife's peasant father, the most fervent of his admirers.
His mother seemed to have put the last of her strength into the
arrangement of that "marriage of convenience." She had fallen into a
senile decrepitude that bordered on dotage. Her sole evidence of being
alive was her habit of staying in church until the doors were closed and
she could stay no longer. At home she did nothing but recite the rosary,
mumbling away in some corner of the house, and taking no part in the
noisy play of her grandchildren. Don Andrés had died, leaving Rafael
sole "boss" of "the Party." He had had three children. They had had
their teeth, their measles, their whooping-cough. These episodes, with a
few escapades of that brother of Remedios, who feared Rafael's paunch
and bald head more than the wrath of don Matias, were the only
distractions in a thoroughly dull existence.
Every year he bought a new piece of land. He felt a thrill of pride when
from the top of San Salvador--that Hermitage, alas, of such desperate
and unfading memory!--he looked down upon the vast patches of land with
orange-trees in straight rows and fenced in by green walls, that all,
all, belonged to him. The joy of ownership, the intoxication of property
had gone to his head.
As he entered the old mansion, entirely made over now, he felt the same
sense of well-being and power. The old chest in which his mother used to
keep her money stood where it had always stood; but it was no longer
devoted to savings hoarded slowly at the cost of untold sacrifice and
privation to raise mortgages and temporize with creditors. Never again
had he tip-toed up in the dark to rifle it. Now it was his own. And at
harvest time it became literally crammed with the huge rolls of
banknotes his father-in-law paid over in exchange for the oranges of the
Brull orchards. And Rafael had a covetous eye on what don Matías had in
the banks; for all that, too, would come to him when the old man died.
Acquisitiveness--money and land--had become his one, his ruling passion.
Monotony, meanwhile, had turned him into an accurate, methodical,
meticulous machine; so that every night he would make out a schedule,
hour for hour, of all that he would do on the following day. At the
bottom of this passion for riches conjugal contagion probably lay. Eight
years of unbroken familiarity had finally inoculated him with most of
the obsessions and most of the predilections of his wife.
The shrinking, timorous little she-goat that used to gambol about with
him in pursuit, the poor child who had been so wistful and downcast
during the days of his wantonness, had now become a woman with all the
imperious obstinacy, all the domineering superiority of the female of
the species as it has evolved in the countries of the South. Cleanliness
and frugality in Remedios took the form of unendurable tyranny. She
scolded her husband if he brought the slightest speck of dust into the
house on his shoes. She would turn the place upside down, flay all the
servants alive, if ever a few drops of oil were spilled from a jar, or a
crumb of bread were wasted on the table.
"A jewel for the home! And didn't I tell you so?" her father would
whisper, satisfied with his daughter's obtrusive qualities.
Rafael, for his part, found them intolerable. He had tried to love his
bride in the early months of their marriage. He made an honest effort to
forget, and recall the playful, passionate impulses he had felt on those
days when he had chased her around the orchards. But after a first fever
of passion had passed, she had proved to be a cold, calculating
child-bearer, hostile to expansiveness of love out of religious
scruples, viewing it her duty to bring new offsprings into the world to
perpetuate the House of Brull and to fill "grandaddy" don Matías with
pride at sight of a nursery full of future "personages" destined to the
heights of political greatness in the District and in the nation.
Rafael had one of those gentle, temperate, honest, households that, on
the afternoon of their walk through Valencia, don Andrés had pointed out
to him as a radiant hope, if only he would turn his back on his mad
adventure. He had a wife; and he had children; and he was rich. His
father-in-law ordered shotguns for him from his correspondents in
England. Every year a new horse was added to the stable, and don Matias
would see to purchasing the best that could be found in the fairs of
Andalusia. He hunted, took long horseback rides over the roads of the
district, dispensed justice in the _patio_ of the house, just as his
father don Ramón had done. His three little ones, finding him somewhat
strange after his long absences in Madrid and more at home with their
grand-parents than with him, would group themselves with bowed, bashful
heads around his knees, silently waiting for his paternal kiss.
Everything attainable around him was within his reach for the asking;
and yet--he was not happy.
From time to time the adventure of his youth would come back to his
mind. The eight years that had passed seemed to have put a century
between him and those ancient days. Leonora's face had slowly, slowly,
faded in his memory, till all he could remember were her two green eyes,
and her blond hair that crowned her with a crown of gold. Her aunt, the
devout, ingenuous doña Pepa, had died some time since--leaving her
property for the salvation of her soul. The orchard and the Blue House
belonged now to Rafael's father-in-law, who had transferred to his own
home the best of its equipment--all the furniture and decorations that
Leonora had bought during her period of exile, while Rafael had been in
Madrid and she had thought of living the rest of her life in Alcira.
Rafael carefully avoided revisiting the Blue House, out of regard for
his wife's possible susceptibilities. As it was, the woman's silence
sometimes weighed heavily upon him, a strange circumspection, which
never permitted the slightest allusion to the past. In the coldness and
the uncompromising scorn with which she abominated any poetic madness in
love, an important part was doubtless played by the suppressed memory of
her husband's adventure with the actress, which everybody had tried to
conceal from her and which had deeply disturbed the preparations for her
wedding.
When the deputy was alone in Madrid, as much at liberty as before his
marriage, he could think of Leonora freely, without those restraints
which seemed to disturb him back at home in the bosom of his family.
What could have become of her? To what limits of mad frolic had she gone
after that parting which even after years had passed, still brought a
blush of shame to Rafael's cheeks? The Spanish papers paid very little
attention to matters of foreign art. Only twice in their columns did he
discover Leonora's stage name with an account of her new triumphs. She
had sung in Paris in French, with as much success as a native _artiste_.
The purity of her accent had surprised everyone. In Rome she had played
the "lead" in an opera by a young Italian composer, and her coming had
been announced by press agents as a great event. The opera had failed to
please; not so the singer. Her audience had been moved to tears by her
execution of a scene in the last act, where she wept for a lost love.
After that--silence, no news whatever! She had disappeared. A new love
affair, Rafael supposed, a new outburst of that vehement passion which
made her follow her chosen man like a slave. And Rafael felt a flash of
jealousy at the thought, as if he had rights over the woman still, as if
he had forgotten the cruelty with which he had bidden her farewell.
That, fundamentally, had been the cause of all the bitterness and
remorse in his life. He understood now that Leonora had been his one
genuine passion: the love that comes to people once in a lifetime. It
had been within reach of his hand, and he had failed to grasp it, had
frightened it away forever with a cowardly act of villany, a cruel
farewell, the shame of which would go to the grave with him. Garlanded
in the orange-blossoms of the orchard, Love had passed before him,
singing the Hymn of wild Youth that knows neither scruples nor ambition.
Love, true love had invited him to follow--and he had answered with a
stab--in the back! That love would never return, as he well knew. That
mysterious being with its smiles and with its frolics, goes forever when
once it goes. It knows no bartering with destiny. It demands blind
obedience and bids the lover take the woman who offers her hand,
orchard-maid or prima donna as she may be. The man who hesitates is
lost.
And Rafael felt that an endless night had closed around him! He found
all his efforts to escape from his dullness and depression vain. He
could not shake off the senility that was creeping over his spirit.
Sadly he bowed to the conviction that another love like the first was
impossible.
For two months he had been the lover of Cora, a popular girl of the
private rooms of the Fornos, a tall, thin, strong Galician beauty--as
strong, alas, as the other. Cora had spent a few months in Paris, and
had returned thence with her hair bleached and a distinctly French
manner of lifting her skirt as if she were strolling along the
_trottoir_ of the _boulevards_. She had a sweet way of mixing French
words in her conversation, calling everybody _mon cher_ and pretending
expertness in the organization of a supper. At all events she shone like
a great _cocotte_ among her competitors, though her real asset was a
line of _risqué_ stories, and a certain gift for low songs.
Rafael soon wearied of this affair. He did not like her manufactured
beauty, nor her tiresome chatter that always turned on fashions. She was
always wanting money for herself and for her friends. Rafael, as a
wealthy miser, grew alarmed. Remorsefully he thought of his children's
future, as if he were ruining them; and of what his economical Remedios
would say of his considerably augmented expenditures. Well he knew that
Remedios haggled for everything down to the last _céntimo_, and that her
one extravagance was an occasional new shawl for the local Virgin, and
an annual _fiesta_ for the Saint with a large orchestra and hundreds of
candles! He broke off relations with the Galician _boulevardière_, and
found the rupture a sweet relief. It seemed to remove a sully from the
memory of his youthful passion. Moreover, his Party had just returned to
power and it was important to have no blemish on his standing as a
"serious" person! He resumed his seat on the Right, and near the Blue
Bench this time, as one of the senior deputies. The moment for work had
come! Now, it was time to see whether he could not make a position for
himself with one good boost!
They named him to the Committee on the Budget, and he took it upon
himself to refute certain strictures presented by the Opposition to the
Government program on Pardon and Justice. One friend he could count on
was the minister: a respectable, solemn marquis who had once been an
Absolutist, and who, wearied of platonisms, as he put it, had finally
"recognized" the liberal regime, without amending his former ideas,
however.
Rafael was as nervous as a schoolboy on the eve of his first
examinations. At the library he studied everything that had been said on
the subject by countless deputies in a century of Parliamentary
government. His friends in the Conference Chamber--the legislative
bohemia of "ex-honorables" and unsuccessful aspirants, who were loyal to
him in gratitude for passes to the floor--were encouraging him and
prophesying victory. They no longer approached him to begin: "When I was
auditor ..." to indulge in a veritable intoxication on the fumes of
their past glory; no longer did they ask him what don Francisco thought
of this, that, or the other thing, to draw their own wild inferences
from his replies and start rumors going based on "inside information."
Now, quite frankly, they "advised" him, giving him hints in accordance
with what they had said or meant to say during that discussion of the
budget back in González Brabo's time, to end by murmuring, with a smile
that gave him the shudders: "Well, anyhow, we'll see! Good luck to you!"
And that flock of disgruntled spirits who sat around waiting for an
election that would never come and ran like old war-horses at the scent
of gun-powder to group themselves, as soon as a row started and the bell
began to ring for order, in two factions on either side of the
president's chair, could never have imagined that the young deputy, on
many a night, broke off his study with a temptation to throw the thick
tomes of records against the wall, yielding finally, with thrills of
intense voluptuousness, to the thought of what might have become of him
had he gone out into life on his own in the trail of a pair of green
eyes whose golden lights he thought he could still see glittering in
front of him between the lines of clumsy parliamentary prose, tempting
him as they had tempted him of yore!