"Why, man, what's the matter with you?" asked Torres finally. "Hadn't we better be going? It's three o'clock."
Monsalvat nodded and got up. He took leave of Torres at once, on the pretext he did not feel well, and started off for the South End, toward the Avenida de Mayo, where he lived.
He went to bed at once upon reaching his rooms. But he could not sleep. He did not know why it was; but the sound of the shots that had brought down some of the human creatures in the mob at Lavalle Square, and the song they had sung, became interwoven with one of the cabaret tangos he had just been hearing. This strange music haunted his ears and drove sleep far from him. Later, when he had fallen into a kind of half slumber, there came towards him a procession of frightful figures, howling and groaning louder and louder as they approached; and he knew that this procession was Humanity. It was already dawn when he began to sleep—uneasily and for only a little while. But even this semblance of slumber brought with it a nightmare. A monstrous phantom, covered with gold, silks, and precious stones, its jaws those of an apocalyptic beast, its claws, too, dripping blood, was there before him, in his room, although scarcely contained by it. The monster approached his bed, showing its fangs, about to devour him; and this monster, with its charnel house of a belly, where lay countless generations of the world's unfortunates, was Injustice.
Monsalvat got up late. He was quiet now. At last there was new life within him. Everything had new life, new meaning. What this new life was he could not have said. But he knew that within him there was now a sense of clearness where before there had been nothing but confusion and obscurity.
He breakfasted and went out, thinking, rather vaguely, that he would go to his mother's. But, as he walked on, he turned in another direction. Moving absent-mindedly, yielding to a new sweet sense of inner calm, he seemed not to notice the streets along which he passed. When he came to himself, he noted that he was within a few yards of Nacha's house. Without hesitating, certain now that he was doing the right thing, he went up the steps and rang the bell.
CHAPTER IV
Nacha had not been able to sleep. Rarely, even in her unhappy life, had she spent so bad a night. On arriving home from the cabaret, Arnedo had gone to bed in silence. This Indian-like taciturnity of his always terrified her. Dread of the man's violence, fear of being once more abandoned, and forced to return to her former precarious circumstances, mingled with the anxieties the day had brought her. Carlos Riga, she had only that morning learned, was dying in a hospital ward. Yet curiously, what tortured her more than grief for her former lover or fear for her own life, was the uneasiness aroused within her by the memory of how she had treated that unknown man who had so chivalrously come to her defense in the cabaret. He had been ready to risk his life for her, and she had rewarded him with a laugh, a laugh half of fear, half of distraction; but to him it must have seemed one of treacherous mockery.
Into her heart that night a new, a strangely engrossing uneasiness had come, a presentiment which she could not have explained, but which she knew she must conceal from Arnedo as though it were a crime. It was a sense of impending evil, an accumulation of forebodings—reminiscences that the news of Riga's condition had brought up, memories of the evening itself; bits of her own past; pictures, which her frightened imagination painted, of a terrible future—a future with at best such poor, such ill-nourished, such unsubstantial hopes—all blending into a vague conviction that Fate had decreed some great misfortune for her.
How she longed for the relief of slumber! She would need to look fresh and happy when she faced Arnedo the following day. This preoccupation filled her insomnia with a sort of hectic frenzy.