She positively knew nothing. Percy only smiled mysteriously.
One brilliantly fine morning they went ashore at white Cadiz.
“Here is my present,” said Percy. “It is the country that suits your hair and your eyes.”
At the sanatorium Hedvig had forgotten to be Spanish. She felt terribly nervous and cast out into the unknown.
“Now we will choose towns for you, just as one chooses frocks,” continued Percy. “We shall begin with Seville, though I suspect that Toledo would be the most suitable.”
So they arrived at Seville.
“I can’t offer you an auto-da-fé,” he whispered. “You will have to be satisfied with a ‘corrida’.”
Above the entrance to the plaza de toros there stood in big letters “Press Bull-fight in commemoration of the immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary.”
With eyes that still smarted and burnt from all the pitiless light on the yellow sand of the arena Hedvig saw within a fraction of a second a little grey bull, with the picador’s dart in his neck, bury his horns into the stomach of the rearing horse. The horse beat the air helplessly with his forefeet and lifted his slender neck and his head with a gesture of wild, maddening pain, and then fell heavily on one side with the picador beneath him, but only to rush up again and to gallop, pursued by the bull, round the arena with bleeding sides and trailing entrails.
Hedvig stared fixedly down. She was very pale.