The Torrent | Page 3

talk about
the orange crop, or cock-fighting. He would be expected to tell them
what kind of a man the Premier was--and then spend the afternoon
analyzing the character of every minister! Then don Andrés would be
there, that boresome Mentor who, at the instance of Rafael's mother,
would never let him out of sight for a moment. Bah! The Club could
wait! He would have plenty of time later in the day to stifle in that
smoke-filled parlor where, the moment he showed his face, everybody
would be upon him and pester the life out of him with questions and
wire-pulling!
And more and more yielding to the lure of the southern sunshine and to
those perfumes of May floating about him in wintertime, he turned off
into a lane that led to the fields.
As he emerged from the ancient Ghetto and found himself in the open
country, he drew a deep breath, as if to imprison in his lungs all the life,
bloom and color of his native soil.

The orange orchards lined both banks of the stream with straight rows
of green, round tree-tops. The sun glistened off the varnished leaves;
the wheels of irrigating machines sounded from the distance like
humming insects. The moisture rising from the canals, joined the
clouds from the chimneys of the motors, to form a thin veil of mist over
the countryside, that gave a pearly transparency to the golden light of
the afternoon.
To one side rose the hill of San Salvador, its crest topped with the
Hermitage, and the pines, the cypresses, and the prickly pears around
that rough testimonial of popular piety. The sanctuary seemed to be
talking to him like an indiscreet friend, betraying the real motive that
had caused him to evade his appointment with his political friends and
disobey his mother into the bargain.
Something more than the beauty of the fields had enticed him from the
city. When the rays of the rising sun had awakened him that morning
on the train, the first thing he had seen, before opening his eyes even,
was an orange orchard, the bank of the Júcar, and a house painted
blue,--the very one that was now in sight away off there, among the
round tree-tops along the river.
How many times in past months his thoughts had lingered on the
memory of that same scene!
Afternoons, in the Congress, while the Premier on the Blue Bench
would be answering the interpellations of the Opposition in sharp
incisive tones, Rafael's brain would begin to doze, reduced to jelly, as it
were, by the incessant hammering of words, words, words! Before his
closed eyes a dark veil would begin to unroll as if the moist, cellar-like
gloom in which the Chamber is always plunged, had thickened
suddenly, and against this curtain, like a cinema dream, rows of
orange-trees would come into view, and a blue house with open
windows; and pouring through the windows a stream of notes from a
soft voice, ever so sweet, singing lieder and ballads as an
accompaniment to the hard, sonorous paragraphs snapping from the
Premier's teeth. Then applause and disorder! The moment for voting
had arrived, and the fading outlines of the Blue House still hovering

before his dreamy eyes, the member for Alcira would ask his neighbor:
"How do we vote? Yes or no?"
The same it was at night at the Opera, where music served only to
remind him of a familiar voice winding like a thread of gold out across
the orchards through the orange trees; and the same again, after dinner
with his colleagues on committees, when the deputies, their cigars tilted
cockily upwards between their lips, and with all the voluptuous gaiety
inspired by good digestions, would troop off to see the night out in
some trustworthy house of assignation where their dignity as
representatives of the country would not be compromised!
Now that blue house was actually before his eyes! And he was hurrying
toward it,--not without some hesitation; a vague uneasiness he could
not explain. His heart was in his mouth, it seemed, and he found it hard
to breathe.
Orchard workers came along the road, occasionally, stepping aside to
make room for the famous man, though he answered their greeting
absent-mindedly. What a nuisance! They would all be sure to tell where
they had seen him! His mother would know all about it within half an
hour! And, that evening, a scene in the dining-room! As Rafael walked
on toward the Blue House, he thought bitterly of his situation. Why was
he going there anyhow? Why insist on living in a stew all the time? He
had had two or three short but violent scenes with his mother a few
months before. What a fury that stern,