SPANISH DUSK

‘The care with which the rain is wrong, and the green is wrong, and the white is wrong, the care with which there is a chair and plenty of breathing and the care with which there is incredible justice and likeness, all this makes a magnificent asparagus and also a fountain.’

So says Gertrude Stein. She may be right or she may be wrong, but she is right for me at least in this that, at this moment, looking out from my window on to the silver walls of rain that slash the Cumberland fields, that ‘rain’ is wrong and the green and the white are wrong too—for I am plunged back into memory, memory of twenty-­five years ago. I love this scene as I love none other in the world, and even now the green shoulder of Cat Bells rises to reproach me, and I know that soon those clouds will break, the pale faint blue push its way, as tender as the leaves of a young lettuce, and the trees in my garden shake their glistening drops and raise their heads gratefully to heaven.

My memory for the moment rejects this world of beauty and claims the sun.

I here indulge myself, giving myself up to a breath, a flash of colour, hesitation on a staircase, a kiss from the first woman I ever loved.

It was my first adventure abroad. I was twenty-four years of age. I was to be a diplomat—that was the plan, and meanwhile because I had been always delicate and was an only child I was to be indulged.

My father was not a man given to the indulging of others. An ironical melancholy, native in him perhaps, but springing to action beside the death-­bed of my mother (she died when I was ten years old: he had passionately worshipped her), kept him always from any very close contact with his fellows. Most men and many women feared him, and I, who was perhaps the only human being whom he truly loved, was only at affectionate ease with him in his absence.

As has been my own later case, he had from early days divided his sense of life, of beauty, of passion (if so warm a word may be used of him) between Spain and England. His books on Spanish life and literature, his Cervantes, his Spanish Truth and Spanish Fiction, his Spanish Tragedy and Comedy, are still read, I fancy. The Cervantes at least remains until the present the best work on that great writer. But he was never, as towards the end of his life he constantly told me, able to get on to paper what he really wanted to say.

He returned to Spain again and again, there seemed to be nothing there that he did not see (so far of course as a foreigner is able to see anything), and yet, he died a frustrated man.

He was physically more Spanish than English; short, slight, dark, with that quiet almost stern dignity that is so especially Spanish. He was an exile you might say in both countries, loving this Cumberland scene but sitting in the rain and longing for the dried land that quivers under the sun like a panting dog, and then back again under the snowy peaks of his beloved Nevadas, watching the olives smoking in the clear air, and praising the broken Cumberland sky, the ripple of light over Derwentwater, the thick green woods of Manesty.

It was a great occasion for both of us when I was to make my first Spanish journey. He said little—he was a man of few words—and, as was his way, what he did say was to counteract any kind of romantic notions that I might have formed.

And yet I was romantic. How could it be otherwise? From my babyhood I had understood that Spain was the very heart of romance. In the old Cumberland garden, on the English summer evenings filled with the sound of bees and the scent of roses, a boy to whom anything distant was lovely and anything unseen an adventure, I read Prescott—the old, faded red-­crimson volumes, Ferdinand and Isabella and Philip II. and Irving’s Alhambra and Granada—and how could it be but that Ponce de Leon and Alva and Don John clashed their silver armour about my ears, and the Moors cried from the watered gardens of Granada for vengeance on the accursed dog of a Christian?

Age did not sober me. Three years at Oxford did little to sophisticate me. I was an only child, shy, reserved, terrified of exposing my follies to the world, believing in my dreams more deeply than I dared confess to anyone.

The setting out on that journey was such an adventure as I never knew afterwards, as, alas! I shall never know again. Other journeys there have been, neither worthless nor sterile, but dry and barren indeed compared with that anticipation.

During the journey from Paris to Barcelona my father talked to me about women. He had never ventured on this subject before with me and I can realise now, with my later, older knowledge of him, what a difficult, embarrassing business it must have been for him. He spoke, I remember, with the embarrassment of a man confessing some shameful secret to another. He had, of course, himself no shameful secret to confess. He spoke of his love for my mother and told me that if I could I must hold myself sacred for just such a wonderful relationship. But if, on the other hand, I could not so keep myself, I was to ask his advice and remember that he was a man of the world. A man of the world! My poor father! I suppose no man was ever less of one! But I too, on my side, had no secrets to confess. I had ideals quite as beautiful, quite, if you please, as foolish as any that he could have wished for me. I confessed at last that I had never kissed a woman nor been kissed by one, save for my cousins who were to me female as the cow is female but with no more sex than that.

He was relieved, I fancy, but anxious too. He wanted me to be a man and found me, I fear, a good deal of a half-­baked prig. In myself I had for some time now realised my own sad absence of experience and was most anxious to remedy it, but did not wish, more than any other boy, that my father should be witness of that part of my education.

He said no more and the barrier between us was increased rather than weakened by our halting little attempt at intimacy.

Nevertheless, his words only added to my already almost trembling excitement. Women! It needed only that word to complete the picture. I burned to have my first adventure, but so absurdly sensitive was I at that time to every minute impression that the smallest thing—a word, a gesture, a scent, a turn of the hand—could frighten my admiration, check my approval, cool my romance.

What I wanted was to be carried off my feet, to be flung, whether I wished or no, into that condition of worshipping adoration that asks no question. Then—so my pride assured myself—the lover that I could be! Poor boy—remote, touching, above all honest figure with motives clear as crystal and life as simple as a saint’s Credo—how near and how far you are from me now. The rain is ceasing. All the trees glitter and the faint tender blue steals through the grey just as I knew it would, and the wing of a silver cloud flutters over the shadow of the Lake.

We arrived, I remember, in Barcelona at mid-­day, and I can feel now, as I sit here, the fresh agony of my disappointment. Ponce de Leon in his silver armour, Alva stern and cruel on his coal-­black horse—and here under a grey, gritty sky with a wind in it, the trams rattling, men as unromantically attired as though they were in Sheffield discussing business prices, the shops filled with vulgar clothes and the shabbiest of sham jewellery. I was sulky and silent. I could have wept. My father made what was for him so rare a thing, an affectionate gesture, pressing my arm with his hand.

‘There are so many things in Spain,’ he said, ‘that are not as you expect them to be. Patience. Wait for something to happen. It always does here.’

Even that very afternoon I moved a step forward. Looking back now I seem to see clearly that all these little incidents were steps towards that one great moment that it is my wish here to recreate. In the middle of that afternoon my father left me on business, and I found my way into the Cathedral. Stepping into Barcelona Cathedral is tumbling into a well of blackness. There is no other Cathedral so dark. At first I groped my way about, but feeling already a certain pleasurable stir at the velvet pressure of the obscurity, the distant sound of echoing voices and the shadowed colour of high, richly deep windows. I stumbled at length to the lighter shadows before the High Altar and there at my back was the choir and in the choir the priests and boys busy over Vespers. It was all exciting and novel to me. Seated on the hard little bench, timidly twisting myself around so that I might see all that went on without appearing too rudely inquisitive, I watched everything as though it were a play. Soon the bells clashed and rattled, a door opened in the wall, the organ burst into what seemed to me a merry jig, and a little procession came out, an old man in a white wig and a rich crimson gown, two little boys bearing gigantic candlesticks with lighted candles, and behind them some four or five priests robed in gold and purple. They all hurried into the choir, and the organ played even more merrily and the prayers were chanted, and I was in an ecstasy. Under what seemed to my Protestant eyes a lectern, the old man with the white wig stood, the little boys on either side of him. I was yet more enchanted when I found the little boys pinching the wax off their candles and throwing it at one another while the old man, who had the rheumatics and moved restlessly from one foot to the other, reproached them gently and the little boys paid him no attention.

Then the organ played another tune, and out the little procession came again, hurrying once more for its very life, up to the altar, then down again with the incense, a minute child with a shock-­head of untidy black hair swinging the censer with all his body and soul, down the precipitous steps to the mysterious candle-­lit shrine beneath the altar. When they passed me and I was flooded with a cloud of incense, I was swung on that vibrating censer through the opening door into a magic world of light.

That was my first step towards that moment on the high gleaming staircase, the candles glimmering above my head, her hand resting for that immortal second on my forehead . . .

That same night we went to Madrid, and again, as in Barcelona, there was first disappointment and afterwards rapture. Here was no magic city, as I quickly perceived. Once more the trams clanged, shabby little men in dull clothes went about their business, and, for the women, I didn’t see any. An hour or so and I was standing with my father in the Prado Gallery. It is one of my difficulties now to select out of all my later maturer experience the first naïveté of that original drama. That first shock of Velasquez (Greco was not for me until later), how can one ever recover it? Great painter, he becomes with one’s passing maturity ever greater, but that leaping to one’s eye of the splendour of Breda, of Las Meninas—and the others—what can one seize upon now but the vague heat of that excitement, the surging, fresh conviction of the nobility and immortality of the soul of man?

I knew at that time but little technically of painting; it had happened, though, that my father by an odd chance had been a friend of Sickert, Whistler, Spencer Gore and Stevens, through coincidence rather than deliberate purpose, and to our dreary empty house in London these men had occasionally come. Through their atmosphere I had caught some consciousness of French painting, and had, silently (because I was always afraid of betraying my ignorance), thought Manet ‘marvellous,’ Sisley ‘wonderful,’ Monet ‘miraculous.’ I had been perhaps in my secret soul conceited of my little knowledge and select preferences. At last now, in one enraptured instant of experience, my conceit fell from me. As my gaze, bewildered, passed from the glorious vitality of the God of Wine in the Borrachos to the fat, sinister malignity of the dwarf in Las Meninas, to the superb courtesy of the heroes of Breda, to the chill dignity of Philip, tears filled my eyes. I could not speak. I hated that my father should be at my side. It was as though my clothes had been suddenly stripped from me. I vowed myself there and then, in a glory of self-­confidence, to the pursuit of Art, rejecting all but the finest, living a century of bare austerities in the ardour of my heroic chase. . . . Alas! alas! how ironically now Cat Bells tosses its shoulder at me beyond my window, laughing in the sunshine at the burnt stick that has fallen from that blazing star!

No matter. I lived in that great moment with all the heroes of the world! I may be said at that instant to have been baptized of Spain. I was never at least to lose touch with her again.

Two days later we were in Granada. I had had in my journey there an hour of the Sierra Morena at sunset, and the burning colour of that hour had brought me to the very edge of trembling anticipation. . . .

Those colours—blood-­red, purple, amber—lying over the sprawling grey hills like sheets of metal, and yet alive so that you could feel the soil breathe beneath their covering, had in their intensity given me a new sense of Light. I was not, in my present raptures, faithless to my own country. Looking back, it seems to me that that eager and ignorant boy was touchingly aware of the ties in his own soul that held him for ever to the English skies so faintly washed, the soil so gently coloured, but here, in this careless splendour of light, there was something savagely opulent and generous that had never been known before. I sat, in that train, staring from the window as though this were a new birth for me, and my father, his cap tilted over his eyes, soundly slept. . . .

In Granada we drove up the hill through the archway under a sheet of stars. The hotel was filled with passengers from a Mediterranean cruise, but their noise, their absorption in their own affairs, could not rob me of my sense of my own drama—that I was stepping forward at once, without a moment’s delay, into a great adventure.

Next day the Alhambra yet further reassured me. I had expected, from the pictures that I had seen of it, to find it large and gaudy, and was surprised with its gentleness, its colours of pigeon-­grey and soft rose, the ceilings that hung in pointed clusters touched with flecks of blue, the fountains, the sounding waters, the views from every window of the town far below in patterns of silver-­white against the hill—and above it all the Sierra Nevada with peaks of crystal that cut the blue. But it was all so gentle, so different from the fierce figures of old Muley Abu’l Hassan and the terrible Ez-­Zagal.

Nevertheless, it completed my preparation. It whispered to me as the Nevadas flamed in sunset that my great moment was assured.

So far, looking back, I have been able to recover with some certainty my little history. From the Barcelona Cathedral to the Prado, from the Prado through the Sierra Morena to the Alhambra everything is clear like a geography book: ‘The principal rivers of Spain are the Guadalquivir, the, etc., etc.’ But now, with my father and myself seated next morning in the very rickety­ carriage that was to take us out to the house of my father’s friend, romantic dimness comes down over the scene. Even the name of the house must be hidden. I have never seen it since that time, although on many occasions I might have done so. I have even refused to visualise it with any positive definition for myself. If I call it anything it is the House of the Warrior, for reasons that will soon be plain.

It must be remembered too that there was, for me then, the added dimness of my complete ignorance of the Spanish language. I had been hitherto with my father in cosmopolitan hotels, but now I was to move in a world of strange voices, of sounds mingling and separating in the air like the waters of fountains, and even the sun itself was to look down upon me with a remote and foreign glow.

As we tumbled over the roads, muddy with February rains, with every kilometre of distance the country seemed to me to become stranger; the hills, speckled like English ‘spotted dogs’ with trees that, close to us, rolled their silver sides under the wind, gathered closer about us. The soil suddenly sprang out of its smoky grey into splashes of red streaked as though with blood, and shadows of angry clouds tore over the vast sky like huge birds obeying some god’s command.

That vast sky flamed into purple, a great sun of arrogant gold stared from between the hills into our eyes, then dropped into dun, the dark world pressed upon us as though it would squeeze us flat, we laboured and groaned against the hill, night was everywhere, and we had arrived.

I felt, I remember, a thrill of mingled shyness and anticipation as I stepped timidly beside my father into the hall. It seemed to my first excited gaze to be filled with figures and with smoke. The smoke may have been simply the sudden illumination after the darkness of the carriage, but the candles were blowing in the breeze and there was a faint acrid haze from the logs that hissed and crackled in the big open fireplace. All at least was dim and to my excited fancy richly coloured. Men and women like figures in a play moved about me greeting my father, while I, awkward, embarrassed, hung behind him.

‘This is my son,’ he said in English, and a tall, hawk-­nosed, black-­eyebrowed gentleman, my very personification of a Spaniard, greeted me very kindly. I do not remember what he said. I stared through the blue haze at the white walls, the high carpetless staircase and a magnificent dark picture of a man in armour that hung half-­way up the staircase. This was a grand warrior, this hero, with a black beard and armour of a dull gold, his gauntleted hand sternly set on his sword, and behind him the fires of a red sunset playing on the long silhouette of a dark mountain range.

It seemed to me a glorious picture, the romantic key that I needed, when, quite suddenly, as though she had descended upon us from the sky, standing in front of it was a lady in a white dress, a lace shawl of black silk over her shoulders, a bunch of dark purple violets at her breast. She had turned the corner of the stairs and then, seeing that there were new arrivals, hesitated. A moment later, moving, as it seemed to me, with the utmost grace, she had come down to us, and my father was being introduced to her. I was for the time forgotten until my father himself turning to me said something about our rooms, and we passed to the stairs.

With what startling, lightning vividness is that moment still with me, the dim hall on whose surface the Spanish words rose and fell, the wavering of the candles, the crackling of the logs, and the gentle low voice of that lady as we moved past her towards that golden-­armoured warrior who commanded the stairway.

My room was vast, with a high purple canopy over the bed, dim portraits on the walls, and a beautiful triptych of the Virgin and Saints in faded red and blue over the stone fireplace. I was washing my hands when my father came in and spoke to me with that rough awkwardness that always came to him when he was wishing to show affection. With what sharp accuracy I remember his words!

‘I hope you won’t be lonely here. Several of the men speak English. In any case it will be a fine opportunity for you to observe Spanish life at first hand.’

‘Oh no!’ I answered eagerly. ‘It is just what I hoped. It is the Velasquez pictures come to life.’ Then, more timidly because I feared that he was laughing at my romanticism, ‘Father, who is that lady?’

‘Which lady? There were several.’

‘The one who came down the stairs, to whom you were introduced.’

He told me. Her name? What does it matter? Whatever name she had that night it was not destined to be hers for much longer. He told me that she was a guest there, that she was a lady with her husband from Segovia. He knew nothing at all about them.

That evening was spent by me in watching from my corner. No one, I fancy, paid me very much attention. A shy English boy who knew no Spanish would not be very entertaining company for them. Their Spanish courtesy did what was needful and no more. But indeed I asked for nothing more than to be left alone. Before that first evening was half over I was plunged fiercely, madly, wildly, breathlessly into the intoxicating waters of first love.

Everything maybe had been inevitably leading to this. My father’s long intercourse with Spain, so that it had been for me so long the most romantic country in the world, this my first taste of it, the dark shadows of the Barcelona Cathedral, the paintings at Madrid, the violent burning colours of the sunlit Sierra, the tender light and running waters of the Alhambra, all had led me step by step to this moment.

My own life too had prepared me for it, shy and romantic, keeping always to myself my deepest thoughts, longing for love but resolving to know it only at its finest—yes, all the stage was prepared, the light had gone down that the little drama might begin.

But I like also to think that there was something in the beauty and grace of that lady herself. Was she beautiful in reality? How can I say? Reality, or rather realism, calm, cold, selective, had no part at all in this story.

She sat almost opposite to me at dinner, and on her right was a man, thick-­set and strong but not dark like the other men, fair-­haired, with blue eyes and a gentle rather indeterminate mouth. I noticed him although there was no especial reason then why I should. I think it was because he and she said no single word to one another throughout dinner. They did not look at one another. She was for the most part very silent, speaking only occasionally to the man on the other side of her; he, the fair-­haired man, never spoke at all. Her face was grave, almost sad, and very white under the pile of her dark black hair. Her long white fingers played with the bread beside her plate. She ate and drank very little.

I noticed everything about her, watching her most secretly lest I should seem to be impertinent.

Oddly enough, that night my father, coming to my room to wish me good-­night, spoke near to my thoughts. He spoke of Spanish ladies, how different from anything that we could imagine in England, how gay and pleasant their lives before marriage, watched and guarded of course, but designed only that they should be courted and flattered, every young man serving them, worshipping them, adoring them. Then, from the moment of marriage, imprisonment, the husband their jailer, never free, never alone, their only duty to obey their husband and bear children, the Priest over all.

Following I know not what train of thought, I asked my father of the fair-­haired, blue-­eyed man who had sat next to her at dinner. He was, it seemed, a Belgian, in Spain on some business. And her husband? Her husband was a gentleman, tall and thin and extremely dark, with a shining white hook of a nose. I had seen him talking after dinner gravely and with, I thought, a good deal of self-­complacency with our host.

A prisoner! So she was a prisoner? All night (or so it seemed to me—I dare say that in reality I slept well enough) I lay tossing on my bed, thinking of her thus with that shining hooked nose hanging over her and the eyes behind ceaselessly watching her.

At last I slept, and when I awoke it was to a world of light. Standing at my window with only my English experiences to tell me, I could not believe that light, naked, piercing, sheeted light, could make a flood of glittering fire so cover the world. At the far distance the Sierra Nevada seemed to be built of white flame, and over the great tapestry of the valley the light played like a vast extended note of music. The valley was chequered with colour, the trees that peppered the grey hills, Granada that glittered like a heap of frosted pebble, fields of blood-­red and saffron and emerald and the purple hills crusted in enamel. Every colour, but all subdued to this passionate light that was not angry nor cruel as I had heard that it was in the East, but radiating with conscious happiness and power.

It was into this light that my love was translated. Although we were only in early February, during all our stay at this place the light was there. Every morning I rose to it and every evening I bade it farewell.

‘How lovely the dusk must be,’ I remember thinking, but when that first evening came and I stood by the wall of the garden looking out to the snow hills, I had only an instant of it—one divine moment when the light fell lower, swinging down to purple shadow, and the thin pallor of the almond buds was blue. But it was only an instant caught in my eager hands between light and dark.

How strangely pathetic that first love is! One has learnt as yet no rules. The hot, biting emotions that tear one are so strange and new, so oddly compounded of shame and pride, of diffidence and boldness, hope and despair. One scarcely sees the beloved object; she is dimmed by the glory and worship that one flings over her.

So it was with her now. I scarcely saw her; she was part of the dusky hall, of the portrait of the warrior, of the first blossoming of the almonds, of the silver snow against the blue, the blood-­red soil, three peasants moving down the field scattering the thin mist of the grain, of their sudden harsh cries, the lowing of the cattle, the boy singing as he laid the blue and yellow tiles for a new garden path.

Oddest of all, perhaps, that I should worship her so. I knew nothing at all about her. She never spoke to me, only smiled very gently as she passed me. She spoke indeed very little to anyone. Her husband was always with her and he became to me her grisly, fearsome jailer. I hated him and pictured him in my fancy torturing her.

Her face—how passionately I studied it when I thought that nobody watched me—was often sad, or I fancied so. Oh! If I could but speak her tongue or she mine! But I knew that she understood no English, and the few words that I now had in Spanish——!

At last on my third evening I plucked up heart to say ‘Good-­evening’ to her in Spanish. She turned, smiled most sweetly, and answered me some Spanish words. I tried to say more, but alas! ‘Good-­day,’ ‘Good-­night,’ ‘Thank you,’ ‘Breakfast,’ ‘Dinner’—these were all my pitiful store. As she left me I stood there, my heart beating so that my knees trembled.

Before the end of the week my imagination had created a world for me. I saw her, alone, desolate, in that distant town of Segovia, tyrannised by her hateful husband, longing for release. Who knew but that she had noticed me, had begun to think of me, even to care for me a little? I began—so mad and simple in this early love—to fancy that she realised that there was some especial relationship between us, that she felt my presence when I was in the room with her, that she did not think of me as of the others.

When I lay awake at night I created marvellous fictions in which she made me understand that she loved me, that she hated her bony-­nosed husband, that she would escape with me to England . . .

I rehearsed again and again the scene with my father. ‘You see, father, I love her. I have never loved before. I shall never love again. And she loves me. She also has never loved before . . .’

Alas, alas, the two silver birches who guard now my library door shake their leaves gently in derision of such folly, and there is regret too perhaps because youth can never return.

But dreams are not folly. Reality sometimes pierces them and they reality. So it was with my little story.

We had been guests a week and in another day or two would be gone. I was determined now that somehow I would create my link with her. Schemes chased one another through my brain. I did not eat; I did not sleep; even my father—always unobservant of my moods—was aware at last that something held me.

I need not have schemed; life itself brought me my climax. So the moment came, the moment that still after so many years and so many moments seems to speak of my experience—a flash that lit more landscape than any that flamed for me afterwards. I stood at my window knowing that the instant between daylight and dark that seemed too especially beautiful to me was approaching.

My window was open. The garden shone as the light lowered; the figures of the three sowers passing down the long red field were softening into dark against the glow. I was of course thinking of her, wondering whether she would come perhaps into the garden to catch a picture of that moment of dusk.

Three men passed across the gravel, quietly talking. One I saw as her husband.

My bedroom door was ajar. I heard a step on the passage floor. It hesitated and waited. Driven I know not by what inner certainty, I went to my door. She was standing in the darkening passage, staring into the wall. I saw her dark hair, her pale face, her heaving breasts, and then—that she was crying. She did not try to stop her tears, only stood there as though spellbound.

Her tears tore me with tenderness and love, yes, and triumph too. If she was crying she was in trouble, and if she was in trouble she needed me, and if she needed me——!

I drew her into my room. She came without any resistance. I made her sit down in the tapestried chair by my bed, and then, kneeling beside her, poured my heart out in a torrent of words. What did I say? Would I recover the words if I could?

I told her that I loved her, that I had loved her from the first moment of seeing her, that I could never love another woman, but would adore her, worship her, serve her for ever. That her husband was a tyrant as I knew, but that if she would come with me out of Spain I would make her the most faithful of lovers and husbands, only giving her my life, my service, my soul. . . . And mingled all this with the light of the sky and the pictures of Velasquez and the blood-­red soil of Spain and all the new consciousness of life that had come to me.

She did not of course understand one word of it, but there, allowing me to take her hand, her tears ceased to fall, she stared, I remember, intently in front of her as though listening for some sound. Then she put her hand for a moment on my forehead. At that touch I was all on fire. I sprang to my feet and raised her to hers. Then I held her in my arms and kissed her mouth. She did not move, did not turn away from me. My mouth was on hers, I took her fragrance and her softness into my soul and swam on pinions of ecstasy into the most distant of heavens.

At last, very gently indeed, she disengaged herself. I tried to say more, but something in her eyes forbade me. The last streak of gold in the world lay on my floor in a broad bar of flame. In the passage above the stairs, where all was now dark, she laid her hand for a moment on my forehead, said something that I could not understand, and was gone.

I stayed motionless in my room.

Years afterwards I saw in London a play translated from, I think, the Hungarian, and in the course of it a boy loves a married woman, thinks that she will divorce her husband and marry him—and learns his lesson. Although the lesson that I learnt was very different from his, I sat in the theatre that night overcome with my own memories.

Even as that boy so was I. She loved me. Otherwise she would not have let me kiss her and hold her in my arms. She loved me and she would come with me to England and . . . What matter that I was only twenty-­four and she—I did not think of her age.

She was mine and I was hers for all, for all eternity! I stood there, once and again trembling with my happiness, for I know not how long. Then in the dark I found my way to my bed and, flinging myself down on it, lay there staring with burning eyes into the gloom.

Later—it must have been much later—I heard a great stir about the house. The sounds called me from my trance. Lights flashed beyond my windows, voices called, at last there was a rumble of carriage wheels on the path.

My door opened and my father came in, holding a lamp. I could see that he was gravely concerned.

He came to my bed, touched my arm. ‘Are you asleep?’ he asked.

‘No,’ I answered. And as I looked up at him I wondered, I remember, how he would take my news when he heard it. At first he would be very angry, cast me off perhaps; but afterwards, I was his only son, he loved me. . . .

‘Most unfortunate,’ he said. ‘Very inconvenient for us. We shall have to leave in the morning.’

Leave in the morning! Leave her in the morning? Oh, no! My heart beat fiercely.

‘What is it?’ I asked.

‘The lady from Segovia—you know, you asked about her. Senora S——. . . . She has run off with Mr. B——, the Belgian, the fellow with the fair hair and blue eyes. Three hours ago. They had a carriage waiting at the bottom of the road. They had been planning it, it seems, a long while. Señor S—— has only now found her letter. He is off in a carriage to Granada. The whole house is in an uproar. Most inconvenient for us. We can’t stay on here, that’s certain. No one dreamt it of her. It’s always these quiet women. They’ll have dinner as usual, I suppose, but it’s most uncomfortable.’

I said that I would not come down to dinner. My headache, bad all day, was now frantic. . . .

A man at dinner the other night said authoritatively:

‘Oh, they have no dusk in Spain. Blazing sun one moment, dark the next.’

But I knew better. There is that second of splendour when earth and heaven meet. I had had my second.

Machado has written:

‘Lleva el que deja, y vive que ha vivido’ (‘He carries with him who leaves behind, and lives who has lived ’).

And so it is.

THE END