His two friends looked at one another.... A hopeless case!
"But why so many reforms in the world? Just so that you can marry a prostitute?" Torres brutally rejoined.
Monsalvat did not reply; and the doctor, ashamed of his outbreak, tried to make up for it by a show of affection. Monsalvat sat beside him on a bench; and as Torres went on to trivial matters, he patted his patient on the shoulder now and then.
After a while they went away, none too well pleased. Monsalvat saw plainly that everything about him—his opinions, his recent life, his feelings—were compromising these friends of his. They were kindly and relatively generous fellows, but he knew that they were weak in the presence of social pressure. However much they might care for him, if they should have to choose between him and society, they would without question side with the latter.
The moment this became clear to him, he thought of nothing but of making his escape. He did not want his friends to know where he was going. If he was compromising them he would spare them the trouble and the annoyance of having to desert him. He would desert them. He would rather appear ungrateful than accept the unpleasant situation which is bound to arise when people want to cut a friendship short, and have not the courage to do it. Monsalvat wished to be free also; free, not economically,—for he could earn a living somehow—but free from those friends who constituted the only bond still tying him to society.
One day he fled from the sanatorium. As he possessed only the clothes he was wearing and his pockets were empty, he walked from Almagro to the capital. It was dawn when he started out. The limpid sky deepened into a blue which still showed a few stars. In the streets the shadows were slowly drawing back into such retreats as the trees offered, hanging veil-like about their trunks and branches, and in the distance, out towards the harbor, a delicate rose light had risen to view. What an extraordinary sensation, this first contact with living things, after months of isolation! How innocent life seemed, and young! Oh, surely, the world was new, it had been born again!
Passing along the solitary streets, he lived in his dream, feeling neither cold nor fatigue. Everything had been made over. The sky was clearer than before, objects had an unknown beauty, men were living in harmony.
Then it occurred to him that so it must always seem to one who wanders alone under a sky, and amid colors that offer love to a world awakening to the day; and then he remembered that of all men, only the humble of the earth see this dawn-light, and carry something of its tenderness in their hearts. Was it this, perhaps, which kept them from noticing the approach of another dawn, already sending its heralds across the sky?
He had left the tree-bordered avenues now. The city was awakening. Poor folk, laborers for the most part, passed him now at every step. House doors were opening. The deep blue of the sky had given place to a luminous clarity, and the world was rosy for a moment, enveloped in a shining softness. Then the sun rose, and morning filled with sounds and lights, joys and sorrows. Life! Monsalvat took a deep breath; for it seemed that with this air he breathed in freedom too. He felt that he was sound and good.
But suddenly fatigue overtook him. He tried to distance it, but in vain. It hung on his legs, weighting down his body, making it hard for him to walk. When he reached the Plaza del Once he sat down on a bench, and rested there for an hour, dozing a little. Then he began to consider his situation. Where should he go? First of all he must find lodgings. In a miserable hotel on the Plaza, they refused to give him a room because he had no luggage; and be met with the same refusal in other cheap inns. So the morning passed. Finally he bethought him of a Spaniard whose wife kept a boarding house on the Plaza Lavalle, and for whom he had once done a favor; so he set out for this address.