The Torrent | Page 5

would taste the joy of duty
well done when, after such gymnastics of the will, he could think of her
without great emotion.
At the beginning of his life in Madrid he imagined he had recovered.
New surroundings; continuous and petty satisfactions to vanity; the

kow-towing of doorkeepers in Congress; the flattery of visitors from
here, there and everywhere who came with requests for passes to admit
them to the galleries; the sense of being treated as a comrade by
celebrities, whose names his father had always mentioned with bated
breath; the "honorable" always written before his name; all Alcira
speaking to him with affectionate familiarity; this rubbing elbows, on
the benches of the conservative majority, with a battalion of dukes,
counts and marquises--young men who had become deputies to round
out the distinction conferred by beautiful sweethearts or winning
thoroughbreds,--all this had intoxicated him, filled his mind completely,
crowding out all other thoughts, and persuading him that he had been
completely cured.
But as he grew familiar with his new life, and the novelty of all this
adulation wore off, tenacious recollections rose again in his memory.
At night, when sleep relaxed the will to forget, which his vigilance kept
at painful tension, that blue house, the green, diabolical eyes of its
principal denizen, that pair of fresh lips with their ironic smile that
seemed to quiver between two rows of gleaming white teeth, would
become the inevitable center of all his dreams.
Why resist any longer? He could think of her as much as he
pleased--that, at least, his mother would never learn. And he gave
himself up to the imagination of love, where distance lent an ever
stronger enchantment to that woman.
He felt a vehement longing to return to his city. Absence seemed to do
away with all the obstacles at home. His mother was not so formidable
as he had thought. Who could tell whether, when he went
back--changed as he felt himself to be by his new experiences--it would
not be easier to continue the old relations? After so much isolation and
solitude she might receive him in more cordial fashion!
The Cortes were about to adjourn, so, in obedience to repeated urging
from his fellow-partisans, and from doña Bernarda, to do
something--anything at all--to show interest in the home town--he took
the floor one afternoon at the opening of the session, when only the
president, the sergeant-at-arms, and a few reporters asleep in the

press-gallery, were present, and, with his lunch rising in his throat from
emotion, asked the Minister of Internal Affairs to show a little more
despatch in the matter of flood protection at Alcira--a bill still in its
in-fancy, though it had been pending some seventy years.
After this he was free to return with the halo of a "business-like" deputy
shining about his head--"a zealous defender of the region's interests,"
the local weekly and party organ called him. And that morning, as he
stepped off the train, the deputy, deaf to the Royal March and to the
vivas, stood up on tiptoe, trying to descry through the waving banners
the Blue House nestling in the distance among the orange-trees.
As he approached the place that afternoon he was almost sick with
nervousness and emotion. For one last time he thought of his mother,
so intent upon maintaining her prestige and so fearful of hostile gossip;
of the demagogues who had thronged the doors of the cafes that
morning, making fun of the demonstration in his honor; but all his
scruples vanished at sight of the hedge of tall rose-bays and prickly
hawthorns and of the two blue pillars supporting a barrier of green
wooden bars. Resolutely he pushed the gate open, and entered the
garden.
Orange-trees stretched in rows along broad straight walks of red earth.
On either side of the approach to the house was a tangle of tall
rose-bushes on which the first buds, heralds of an early spring, were
already beginning to appear.
Above the chattering of the sparrows and the rustle of the wind in the
trees, Rafael could hear the sound of a piano--the keys barely touched
by the player's fingers--and a soft, timid voice, as if the song were
meant for the singer alone.
It was she. Rafael knew the music: a Lied by Schubert--the favorite
composer of the day; a master "whose best work was still unknown," as
she said in the cant she had learned from the critics, alluding to the fact
that only the least subtle of the melancholy composer's works had thus
far been popularized.

The young man advanced slowly, cautiously, as if afraid lest the sound
of his footsteps break in upon that melody which seemed to be rocking
the garden lovingly to sleep in the afternoon's golden sunlight.
He reached