The Torrent Part 27

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 role of safety and sanity that had been a.s.signed 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 a.s.siduity!

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 hors.e.m.e.n 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 const.i.tuting 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 soph.o.m.ore 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 a.s.suring 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 a.s.sail 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 ma.s.ses--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 senor don What's-his-Name was in their eyes, a mud-eel, and in their lingo a _congrio_; the ill.u.s.trious 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 pa.s.sed from action to talk, and from talk to pa.s.sivity, and from pa.s.sivity 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 Jucar 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 Andres 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 h.o.a.rded 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 Matias 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 pa.s.sion.

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 pa.s.sion 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, pa.s.sionate impulses he had felt on those days when he had chased her around the orchards. But after a first fever of pa.s.sion had pa.s.sed, 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 Matias 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 Andres 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 Ramon 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 pa.s.sed 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 dona 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 circ.u.mspection, 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 pa.s.sed, 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 pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sion: 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 pa.s.sed 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 compet.i.tors, though her real a.s.set was a line of _risque_ 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 _centimo_, 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 _boulevardiere_, and found the rupture a sweet relief. It seemed to remove a sully from the memory of his youthful pa.s.sion. 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 grat.i.tude for pa.s.ses 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 Gonzalez 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!

II

"Order of the day. Resumption of debate on ecclesiastical appropriations!"

The Chamber suddenly came to life with a wild movement of dispersion, something comparable to the stampede of a herd or the panic of an army.

The deputies of quickest motory reactions were on their feet in an instant, followed by dozens and dozens of others, all making for the doors. Whole blocks of seats were emptied.

The Chamber had been packed from the opening of the Session. It was a day of intense excitement: a debate between the leader of the Right and a former comrade who was now in the Opposition. The jealousy between the two old cronies was resulting in a small-sized scandal. Mutual secrets of their ancient intimacy as colleagues were coming to light--many of the intrigues that had settled historic parliamentary contests for the premiership. The galleries were filled with spectators who had come to enjoy the fun. The deputies and ministers occupied every seat on either hand of the presidential chair. But now the incident was closed. Two hours of veiled insult and pungent gossip had pa.s.sed all too soon. And the phrase "Ecclesiastical Appropriations" had served as a fire-alarm.

Run--do not walk--to the nearest exit!

However, the name of the orator who was now being given the floor served to check the stampede somewhat, much as routs have been stopped by some great historic warcry. A few deputies hurried back to their benches. All eyes turned toward the extreme Left of the Chamber, where, a white head, rising above the red seats over a pair of spectacles and a gently ironical smile, was coming into view.

The old man was on his feet, at last. He was small, so frail of person, that he hardly overtopped the men still seated. All his vital energies had been concentrated in that huge, n.o.bly proportioned head of his, pink at the top, with shocks of white hair combed back over it. His pale countenance had the warlike transparency of a sound, vigorous old age.

To it a shining, luminous silvery beard added a majesty like that with which Sacred Art used to picture the Almighty.