All this made him quite restless, as the chaos of newspapers showed, ABC, Oggi, the Continental Daily Mail, through whose pages he sought some new challenge to erase the indignity of this recent defeat. This was the first vacation he had ever had in his life, aside from enforced recreation periods prolonged at Attica, Atlanta, and other resorts where he was familiar. He had plenty of money, the local currency that is, having sold the remaining packets of his last work to a Levantine who did business in Tangier. Still he could not relax. He was beginning to look like a remittance man, though, with some success, he tried to melt into the people around him, and look like the other men staying in this pension, dressed with spruce seediness, as they were, nervously alert, as they were, and even a plexiglas collar, as they wore. Everything was in order. Even his stomach had settled down, after its first horrendous adventures with the fare in the Pension Las Cenizas.
Still he could not relax. Small things upset him. The mustache, for instance: he was unused to wearing one permanently, and when he came into the room alone and locked the door behind him, reached up to pull it off and toss it into a drawer. And the room was cold. When he complained about it, to the dueño, or the girls in the kitchen where he went to warm his hands, they behaved as though winter had come for the first time to Madrid, and spoke of the cold in terms of a vague wonder which they managed to sustain annually until spring. There was a radiator, a cold, absurd, mocking piece of furniture in one corner, for there was very little coal anywhere in the country; and so he was at last given a brazier whose surface of gray ash remained warm to the touch for some hours. He spent a good deal of time sitting a knee on either side of it, cleaning his nails with the end tooth of a comb. He had tried to read, something more sustained than the papers, but that got nowhere. There was nothing there for him. The same for the paintings of Velasquez and Goya, Dürer, Bosch, Breughel, for he'd even been to the Prado seeking challenge, but there was nothing there for him.
He picked up the Daily Mail, and under "Teddington's Good Win," read again of a distant hockey game. He read again of the visit of four rare (Bewick's) swans at Penns Pond, Richmond Park. He read again of betting law reforms; and a seven-year-old girl killed by a shotgun blast. Under "Today's Arrangements" of an organ recital by Mr. W. J. Tubbs at Holy Trinity, Marylebone; a meeting of the Victoria Young Conservatives, the Johnson Society of London, the Friends of Uruguay Society. There was nothing there for him, and he threw the paper down, but with no alternative, than to pick up another.
A minute later, his brows knitted over an open page. He sat forward, and Digarne quivered in his hands. He looked up from it, and stared abstracted for a full minute at an Andalusian love scene on the wall, then back at the page, his sharp darting eyes glittering with excitement. Pictured in the paper was a face beaming malevolence over a black beard, identified as Señor Kuvetli, a prominent Egyptologist stopping in the capital in the course of his work, which now centered about a search for the lost mummy of a young princess, possibly to be found somewhere in Spain, brought here as a talisman by a retreating band of Gypsies centuries before.
He laid the paper aside and commenced to pace the floor. Then he sat down over the brazier and commenced to clean his nails. The residue from this task dropped on the surface of gray ash, where it sank and burned with a slight puff and a noxious odor which rose to him until suddenly, as though inspired by some divine flatus, he leaped to his feet, and in a matter of minutes was shaved, dressed, and generally caparisoned for the streets.
Before he left his room, however, he took time for a quick look in Baedeker's Spain and Portugal, which he had in two volumes, the original having split into two, and then went to seek the dueño in the dim halls of the pension, after giving the shock of black hair a toss with his broken comb. As he stooped to lock the door, Marga came hurrying down the dark passage, bumped him, and with a flash of her eyes, blond hair, and a blue angora sweater, begged his pardon and was gone inside her own door.
Now there are some women, of retiring nature and modest comportment, who if seen, say, wearing a fur-trimmed cloth coat, are remembered after as having been dressed in the simple cloth coat of whatever color it may have been; and there are others, seen in that same coat, who are recalled sheathed luxuriously and entirely in the fur, and Marga was one of these latter. She was a guest here, and though she had never importuned this exotic neighbor of hers, now adjusting his hair in the dark passage, the mere fact of his avowed origin made him interesting, and she was always exceedingly bright with him, as she was with others there who knew more of her private habits than Mr. Yak might be expected to, keeping to himself as he did quite strictly, but for the dining room, and speaking only when spoken to, in a flow of Spanish which was difficult to follow, was in fact a stiffened Italian from which he pruned the luxurious curls and Neapolitan tendrils as he went along, though as far as that goes neither Marga nor the dueño had ever been to Italy, and neither had ever seen a living Rumanian in their lives.
As for this one she'd just left behind in the chill corridor, he was quite spry this morning, now following a girl laden with two chamber pots toward the kitchen, where two other girls sat picking over a pile of lentils on the metal table top, and the one he had followed went on next door to empty her charges, and rinse them in the bathtub.
He found the dueño there too, in checked carpet slippers, soon had the information he wanted, and left down the linoleum, banging the heavy door so that its bell jangled, moving with a sprightly vigor which might have been surprising even in one of the age he appeared now, the shock ot black hair dancing over his forehead as he hastened toward the Estación del Norte, where he was in time to catch the morning express to Segovia, along whose route his destination lay not far distant.
San Zwingli appeared suddenly, at a curve in the railway, a town built of rocks against rock, streets pouring down between houses like the beds of unused rivers, and the houses littered one against another like boulders along mountain streams. Swallows dove and swept with appalling certainty at the tower of the church, as the morning visitor climbed the hill toward the town, touching now and then at his mustache, as though to make certain it was on straight. He walked with a briskness, and a light in his eye seldom seen today but in asylums and occasional pulpits, the look of a man with a purpose.