CHAPTER IV
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 Dona 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
Dona 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 Dona 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, "Senor 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 Cannebiere 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 Doree. 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. Senor 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 Senor 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 employe
(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 pate 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.
Senor 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 Dona 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 Dona Rita, not of Dona 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: "Senor, 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 Dona 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
Doree 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 Senor 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" (espece d'enfles).
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 Senor 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 Senor
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 Dona 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 Dona 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
Dona 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
Dona 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 Senor 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 Dona 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 Dona 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 Dona 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.
Senor 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 Senor 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 Senor 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.
