Chapter I

We were taking tea in the house of a lady who is a friend of mine, and the talk turned upon the social dramas which develop from act to act, unheeded of the world,--dramas with whose leading characters we have been acquainted, if indeed we have not ourselves played a part in one or another of their scenes.

Among numerous other persons whom I do not remember, there was a girl of the blonde type, fair and slender, who, if she had had a lapful of flowers in place of the blear-eyed little dog that growled half hidden in the wide folds of her skirt, might have been compared without exaggeration to Shakespeare’s Ophelia.

So pure was the white of her forehead, the azure of her eyes.

Conversing with the fair girl was a young man, who stood with one hand resting on the _causeuse_ of blue velvet where she sat and the other caressing the precious trinkets of his gold chain. In his affected pronunciation a slight foreign accent was noticeable, despite the fact that his look and bearing were as Spanish as those of the Cid or Bernardo del Carpio.

A gentleman of mature years, tall, thin, of distinguished and courteous manners, who seemed seriously preoccupied with the operation of sweetening to the exact point his cup of tea, completed the group nearest the fireplace, in whose warmth I sat down to tell this human history. It seems like a fable, but it is not; one could make a book of it; I have done so several times in imagination. Nevertheless, I will tell it in few words, since for him to whom it is given to comprehend it, these few will be more than enough.

Andrés, for so the hero of my tale was called, was one of those men whose hearts abound with feeling for which they have found no outlet, and with love that has no object on which to spend itself.

An orphan almost from his birth, he was left in the care of relatives. I do not know the details of his childhood; I can only say that whenever it was mentioned, his face would cloud and he would exclaim, with a sigh: “That is over now.”

We all say the same, sadly recalling bygone joys. But was this the explanation of his words? I repeat that I do not know; but I suspect not.

As soon as he was grown, he launched out into the world. Though I would not calumniate it, the fact remains that the world for the poor, and especially for a certain class of the poor, is not a Paradise nor anything like it. Andrés was, as the saying goes, one of those people who rise, most days, with nothing to look forward to but twenty-four hours more. Judge then, my readers, what would be the state of a spirit all idealism, all love, put to the no less difficult than prosaic task of seeking our daily bread.

Yet sometimes, sitting on the edge of his lonely bed, his elbows on his knees and his head between his hands, he would exclaim:

“If I only had something to love with all my heart! A wife, a horse, even a dog!”

As he had not a copper to spare, it was not possible for him to get anything,--not any object on which to satisfy his hunger to love. This waxed to such a point that in its acute attacks he came to feel an affection for the wretched closet where he slept, the scanty furniture that met his needs, his very landlady, that patron saint who was his evil genius.

This is not at all surprising; Josephus relates that during the siege of Jerusalem hunger reached such a point that mothers devoured their children.

There came a day when he was able to secure a very small living wage. The evening of that day, when he was returning to his boarding-house, on crossing a narrow street he heard a sort of wail, like the crying of a new-born child. He had taken but a few steps further after hearing those doleful sounds, when he exclaimed, stopping short:

“What the deuce is that?”

And he touched with the toe of his shoe a soft object that moved, and fell again to mewling and whining. It was one of those new-born puppies that people cast out to the mercy of the rubbish heap.

“Providence has placed it in my path,” said Andrés to himself, picking it up and wrapping it in the skirt of his coat; and he carried it to his miserable lodging.

“What now!” grumbled the landlady on seeing him enter with the puppy; “all we needed was this fresh nuisance in the house. Take it back this minute to where you found it, or else look up new quarters for the two of you to-morrow.”

The next day Andrés was turned out of the house, and in the course of two or three months he left some two hundred more, for the same reason. But for all these inconveniences, and a thousand others which it is impossible to detail, he was richly compensated by the intelligence and affection of the dog, with whom he diverted himself as with a person in his long hours of solitude and _ennui_. They ate together, they enjoyed their siestas together, and together they would take a turn in the Ronda, or go to walk along the Carabanchel road.

Evening gatherings, fashionable promenades, theatres, cafés, places where dogs are not allowed or would be in the way, were forbidden to our hero, who sometimes exclaimed from the fulness of his heart, as he responded to the caresses of his very own:

“Doggy mine! you can do everything but talk.”