To
displease her seemed the worst thing that could befall him; to win
her commendation filled him with content. But there were times,
guiltily remembered and put by with shame, when he longed for
something more from life; when the sight of a beautiful woman on
the street reminded him of his own loneliness and isolation; when
he was overcome with a sudden surging sense that he was an
outsider in the midst of these teeming thousands, unloved and old,
without friends or hope or future to look forward to. He would
reproach himself for such lawless repining, for such disloyalty to
his mother. Was not her case worse than his? Did she not lecture
him on the duty of cheerfulness, she the invalid, racked with
pains, with nerves, who practised so pitifully what she preached?
The tears would come to his eyes. No, he would not ask the
impossible; he would go his way, brave and uncomplaining, and let
the empty years roll over his head without a murmur against fate.
But the years, apparently so void, were screening a strange and
undreamed-of part for him to play. The Spaniards, a vague, almost
legendary people, as remote from Raymond's life as the Assamese or
the cliff-dwellers of New Mexico, began to take on a concrete
character, and were suddenly discovered to be the enemies of the
human race. Raymond grew accustomed to the sight of Cuban flags,
at first so unfamiliar, and then, later, so touching in their
significance. Newspaper pictures of Gomez and Garcia were tacked
on the homely walls of barber-shops, in railroad shops, in grubby
offices and cargo elevators, and with them savage caricatures of a
person called Weyler, and referring bitterly to other persons (who
seemed in a bad way) called the reconcentrados.
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