lips which were formed into an odd, sly, insinuating smile. Heard!
To be sure he had heard! The chief of the great arms smuggling

organization!
"Oh!" I said, "that's giving me too much importance." The person

responsible and whom I looked upon as chief of all the business
was, as he might have heard, too, a certain noble and loyal lady.

"I am as noble as she is," he snapped peevishly, and I put him down
at once as a very offensive beast. "And as to being loyal, what is

that? It is being truthful! It is being faithful! I know all
about her."

I managed to preserve an air of perfect unconcern. He wasn't a
fellow to whom one could talk of Dona Rita.

"You are a Basque," I said.
He admitted rather contemptuously that he was a Basque and even

then the truth did not dawn upon me. I suppose that with the
hidden egoism of a lover I was thinking of myself, of myself alone

in relation to Dona Rita, not of Dona Rita herself. He, too,
obviously. He said: "I am an educated man, but I know her people,

all peasants. There is a sister, an uncle, a priest, a peasant,
too, and perfectly unenlightened. One can't expect much from a

priest (I am a free-thinker of course), but he is really too bad,
more like a brute beast. As to all her people, mostly dead now,

they never were of any account. There was a little land, but they
were always working on other people's farms, a barefooted gang, a

starved lot. I ought to know because we are distant relations.
Twentieth cousins or something of the sort. Yes, I am related to

that most loyal lady. And what is she, after all, but a Parisian
woman with innumerable lovers, as I have been told."

"I don't think your information is very correct," I said, affecting
to yawn slightly. "This is mere gossip of the gutter and I am

surprised at you, who really know nothing about it - "
But the disgusting animal had fallen into a brown study. The hair

of his very whiskers was perfectly still. I had now given up all
idea of the letter to Rita. Suddenly he spoke again:

"Women are the origin of all evil. One should never trust them.
They have no honour. No honour!" he repeated, striking his breast

with his closed fist on which the knuckles stood out very white.
"I left my village many years ago and of course I am perfectly

satisfied with my position and I don't know why I should trouble my
head about this loyal lady. I suppose that's the way women get on

in the world."
I felt convinced that he was no proper person to be a messenger to

headquarters. He struck me as altogether untrustworthy and perhaps
not quite sane. This was confirmed by him saying suddenly with no

visible connection and as if it had been forced from him by some
agonizing process: "I was a boy once," and then stopping dead

short with a smile. He had a smile that frightened one by its
association of malice and anguish.

"Will you have anything more to eat?" I asked.
He declined dully. He had had enough. But he drained the last of

a bottle into his glass and accepted a cigar which I offered him.
While he was lighting it I had a sort of confused impression that

he wasn't such a stranger to me as I had assumed he was; and yet,
on the other hand, I was perfectly certain I had never seen him

before. Next moment I felt that I could have knocked him down if
he hadn't looked so amazinglyunhappy, while he came out with the

astounding question: "Senor, have you ever been a lover in your
young days?"

"What do you mean?" I asked. "How old do you think I am?"
"That's true," he said, gazing at me in a way in which the damned

gaze out of their cauldrons of boiling pitch at some soul walking
scot free in the place of torment. "It's true, you don't seem to

have anything on your mind." He assumed an air of ease, throwing
an arm over the back of his chair and blowing the smoke through the

gash of his twisted red mouth. "Tell me," he said, "between men,
you know, has this - wonderful celebrity - what does she call

herself? How long has she been your mistress?"
I reflected rapidly that if I knocked him over, chair and all, by a

sudden blow from the shoulder it would bring about infinite
complications beginning with a visit to the Commissaire de Police

on night-duty, and ending in God knows what scandal and disclosures
of political kind; because there was no telling what, or how much,

this outrageous" target="_blank" title="a.横蛮的；残暴的">outrageous brute might choose to say and how many people he
might not involve in a most undesirable publicity. He was smoking

his cigar with a poignantly mocking air and not even looking at me.
One can't hit like that a man who isn't even looking at one; and

then, just as I was looking at him swinging his leg with a caustic
smile and stony eyes, I felt sorry for the creature. It was only

his body that was there in that chair. It was manifest to me that
his soul was absent in some hell of its own. At that moment I

attained the knowledge of who it was I had before me. This was the
man of whom both Dona Rita and Rose were so much afraid. It

remained then for me to look after him for the night and then
arrange with Baron H. that he should be sent away the very next day

- and anywhere but to Tolosa. Yes, evidently, I mustn't lose sight
of him. I proposed in the calmest tone that we should go on where

he could get his much-needed rest. He rose with alacrity, picked
up his little hand-bag, and, walking out before me, no doubt looked

a very ordinary person to all eyes but mine. It was then past
eleven, not much, because we had not been in that restaurant quite

an hour, but the routine of the town's night-life being upset
during the Carnival the usual row of fiacres outside the Maison

Doree was not there; in fact, there were very few carriages about.
Perhaps the coachmen had assumed Pierrot costumes and were rushing

about the streets on foot yelling with the rest of the population.
"We will have to walk," I said after a while. - "Oh, yes, let us

walk," assented Senor Ortega, "or I will be frozen here." It was
like a plaint of unutterable wretchedness. I had a fancy that all

his natural heat had abandoned his limbs and gone to his brain. It
was otherwise with me; my head was cool but I didn't find the night

really so very cold. We stepped out briskly side by side. My
lucid thinking was, as it were, enveloped by the wide shouting of

the consecrated Carnival gaiety. I have heard many noises since,
but nothing that gave me such an intimateimpression of the savage

instincts hidden in the breast of mankind; these yells of festivity
suggested agonizing fear, rage of murder, ferocity of lust, and the

irremediable joylessness of human condition: yet they were emitted
by people who were convinced that they were amusing themselves

supremely, traditionally, with the sanction of ages, with the
approval of their conscience - and no mistake about it whatever!

Our appearance, the soberness of our gait made us conspicuous.
Once or twice, by common inspiration, masks rushed forward and

forming a circle danced round us uttering discordant shouts of
derision; for we were an outrage to the peculiar proprieties of the

hour, and besides we were obviouslylonely and defenceless. On
those occasions there was nothing for it but to stand still till

the flurry was over. My companion, however, would stamp his feet
with rage, and I must admit that I myself regretted not having

provided for our wearing a couple of false noses, which would have
been enough to placate the just resentment of those people. We

might have also joined in the dance, but for some reason or other
it didn't occur to us; and I heard once a high, clear woman's voice

stigmatizing us for a "species of swelled heads" (espece d'enfles).
We proceeded sedately, my companion muttered with rage, and I was

able to resume my thinking. It was based on the deep persuasion
that the man at my side was insane with quite another than

Carnivalesque lunacy which comes on at one stated time of the year.
He was fundamentally mad, though not perhaps completely; which of

course made him all the greater, I won't say danger but, nuisance.
I remember once a young doctor expounding the theory that most

catastrophes in family circles, surprising episodes in public
affairs and disasters in private life, had their origin in the fact

that the world was full of half-mad people. He asserted that they
were the real majority. When asked whether he considered himself