The Quest Part 24

They brought with them a small bundle of clothes, a dirty poodle with a very intelligent look, and a monkey tied to a chain; in a short while they had to sell the monkey to some gipsies that lived in the Quinta de Goya.

Don Alonso called Manuel and said to him:

"Run off and hunt up Don Roberto, and tell him that there's a woman here named Rosa, and that she is or has been a circus acrobat; she must be the one he's looking for."

At once Manuel went off to the house; Roberto had left the place and Manuel did not know his whereabouts.

Don Alonso carne frequently to the Corralon and conversed with the mother and the girl. On the window-sill of their tiny home the mother and the daughter had a little box with a sprig of mint planted in it; although they watered it every morning, it scarcely grew, for there was no sun. One day the woman and child disappeared together with their pretty poodle; they left nothing in their quarters except a worn-out, broken tambourine.

Don Alonso got into the habit of visiting the Corralon; he would exchange a few words with Rebolledo, he of the modernist barber-shop who chattered away, and would witness the gymnastic prowess of Aristas. One afternoon the boy's mother asked the former Snake-Man whether the child showed any real apt.i.tude.

Don Alonso grew serious and subjected the boy's performance to a searching examination, so that he could form an estimate of the youngster's abilities and give him a little useful advice.

It was really curious to see the former circus-player give his orders; he went through them with august seriousness.

"One, two, three.... Hop-la!... Once more, now. At position. The knees near the head ... nails down ... One, two ... one, two.... Hop-la!"

Don Alonso was not at all displeased with little Aristas' showing, but he emphasized the unavoidable necessity of continual hard practise.

"Whoever wants something has to pay the price, my little fellow," he said. "And the profession of gymnast isn't within everybody's reach."

To the mother he confided that her son might some day be a fine circus artist.

Then Don Alonso, finding himself before a numerous public, would begin to talk volubly of the United States, of Mexico, and the South American republics.

"Why don't you tell us stories of the countries you've been to?" asked Perico Rebolledo.

"No, not now; I have to go out with the _Infiel_ Tower."

"Ah! Go on, tell us," they would all implore.

Don Alonso pretended to be importuned by the request; but when he got going, he spun one yarn after the other in such numbers that they almost had to beg him to stop.

"And didn't you ever see in those countries men who had been killed by lions?" asked Ariston.

"No."

"Then there aren't any lions?"

"Lions in cages ... yes, a lot."

"But I mean at liberty, in the fields."

"In the fields? No."

Don Alonso seemed rather provoked to make these confessions.

"No other wild beasts, either?"

"There are no longer any wild beasts in the civilized countries," said the barber.

"Why, see here, there certainly are wild beasts over there," and Don Alonso, wrinkling his features into a jesting grimace, winked slily at Rebolledo. "Once a terrible thing happened to me; we were sailing by an island when we heard cannon shots. It was the garrison firing off a salvo."

"But what are you laughing at?" asked Ariston.

"Nervousness.... Well, as I was saying, I went up to the captain of the s.h.i.+p and asked his permission to let me land on the island. 'Very well,' he said to me, 'take the Golondrina, if you wish,'--Golondrina was the name of the canoe; 'but you must be back within a couple of hours.'

"I set off in my boat and hala! hala! ... I reached the island, which was thickly planted with plane-trees and cocoanut-trees, and I disembarked on the beach into which the Golondrina had thrust its prow."

Here Don Alonso's features were convulsed with the impossibility of restraining his laughter; he shot a glance at the barber, accompanied by a confidential wink.

"I land," he continued, "then I start running, and soon, paf! ... in the face; a huge mosquito, and then, paf! ... another mosquito, until I was surrounded by a swarm of the animals, each one as large as a bat. With a scarred face I begin to run for the beach so as to escape in my canoe, when I catch sight of a lobster right next to the Golondrina; but what a lobster I He must have been as big as a bear; he was black, and s.h.i.+ny, and went chug, chug, chug, like an automobile. No sooner did the creature set eyes on me than he began to rush upon me with loud outcries; I ran for a cocoanut tree, and one, two, three, I s.h.i.+nnied right up the trunk to the top. The lobster approaches the tree, stops meditatively, and decides to s.h.i.+nny up after me,--which he did."

"An awful situation," commented the barber.

"Just imagine," replied Don Alonso, blinking. "I only had a little stick in my hands, and I defended myself against the lobster by hitting him in the knuckles; but he, roaring with rage, and eyes s.h.i.+ning, continued climbing. I couldn't get any farther, and I was thinking of coming down; but as I made a movement, biff!... The son of a sea-cook grabs me with one of his many legs by the coat and remains there hanging from me. The cussed critter was as heavy as lead; he was already reaching up after me with another claw when I remembered that I had in my vest pocket a toothpick that I had bought in Chicago, and that it had a knife attachment; I opened this, and in a moment slashed off the tail of my coat, and cataplun! ... down from a height of at least forty metres the lobster fell to the ground. I can't understand how he wasn't killed. There he began to cry and howl, and go round and round the cocoanut tree in which I was, glaring at me with his terrible eyes. Whereupon I--for being a gymnast had to come in handy to a fellow,--began to leap from one cocoanut tree to the next and from one plane-tree to the other, while the lobster kept following me, howling away with the tail of my coat in his teeth.

"Reaching near the beach I find that the tide has gone out and that the Golondrina is more than fifty metres above the waves. 'I'll wait,'

I said to myself. But at this moment I see, thrusting its head out from the tree-top that I was then on, a serpent; I seize a branch, swing up and back for a while so that I can land as far as possible from the lobster, when the d.a.m.ned branch breaks on me and I lose my support."

"And what did you do then?" asked the barber.

"I took two somersaults in the air at a hazard."

"That was a useful precaution."

"Certainly I thought I was lost. On the contrary, I was saved."

"But how?" asked El Ariston.

"Very simple. For as I fell, with the branch in my hand, I landed plump on the lobster, and as I came down with such a high velocity, I pierced him right through with the branch and left him nailed to the beach. The animal roared like a bull; I jumped into the Golondrina and made my escape. But my vessel had sailed away. I began to row, but there wasn't a sail in sight. 'I'm lost,' says I to myself. But thanks to the lobster, I was rescued...."

"The lobster?" asked everybody in amazement.

"Yes sirree; a steamboat that was on its course many miles off, on hearing the lobster's wails thought that this might be the signal of some s.h.i.+pwrecked crew; it drew near the island, picked me up, and in a few days I was back with my company."

As he finished his tale Don Alonso made a most expressive grimace, and left with his _Infiel_ Tower for the street. Aristas, Rebolledo and Manuel applauded the old circus man's stories, and the apprentice gymnast felt more determined than ever to continue practicing upon the trapeze and the springboard, so that some day he might behold those distant lands of which Don Alonso spoke.

A few weeks later there occurred one of the events that left upon Manuel the deepest impression of his entire career. It was Sunday; the boy went to his mother's place, and helped her, as usual, to wash the dishes. Then came Petra's daughters, and they spent the whole afternoon quarrelling over a skirt or a petticoat that the younger had bought with the elder sister's money.

Manuel, bored by the chatter, invented some excuse and left the house.

The rain was coming down in bucketfuls; Manuel reached the Puerta del Sol, entered the cafe de Levante and sat down near the window. The people outside, dressed in their Sunday clothes, scampered by to places of refuge in the wide doorways of the big square; the coaches rumbled hurriedly on amidst the downpour; umbrellas came and went and their black tops, glistening with rain, collided and intertwined like a shoal of tortoises. Presently it cleared up and Manuel left the cafe; it was still too early to return to the house; he crossed the Plaza de Oriente and stopped on the Viaduct, watching from that point the people strolling along Segovia street.

In the sky, which was becoming serene, floated a few dark clouds with silver linings, resembling mountains capped with snow; blown by the wind, they scurried along with outspread wings; the bright sun illumined the fields with its golden rays; resplendent in the clouds, it reddened them like live coals; a few cloudlets scudded through s.p.a.ce, white flakes of foam. The hillocks and dales of the Madrilenian suburbs were not yet mottled with green gra.s.s; the trees of the Campo del Moro stood out reddish, skeleton-like, amidst the foliage of the evergreens; dark rolls of vapour rose along the ground, soon to be swept away by the wind. As the clouds pa.s.sed by overhead, the plain changed hue; successively it graded from purple into leaden-grey, yellow, copper; the Extremadura cart-road, with the rows of grey, dirty houses on each side, traced a broken line. This severe, melancholy landscape of the Madrilenian suburbs, with their bleak, cold gloominess, penetrated into Manuel's soul.

He left the Viaduct balcony, sauntered through several narrow lanes, until he reached Toledo Street, walked down the Ronda and turned in toward his house. He was getting near the Paseo de las Acacias when he overheard two old women talking about a crime that had just been committed at the corner of Amparo Street.