THE LOVE OF CLOTILDE

Armando Palacio Valdes

In the dressing-room of Clotilde, leading actress of one of the most important theaters in the capital, there gathered every night about half a dozen of her male friends.  The reception lasted almost always about as long as the performances; but it included a number of parentheses.  Whenever the actress, was obliged to change her costume she would turn towards her visitors with a bewitching smile and beseeching eyes: 

“Gentlemen, will you withdraw for one little moment?—­not more than one little moment.”

Thereupon they would all transfer themselves to the ante-room and remain there patiently waiting.  No, I am mistaken, not quite all, because the youngest of them, a third year student in the School of Medicine, would avail himself of the chance to take a turn in the wings to stretch his legs and snatch a fugitive kiss or so.  At all events, the majority remained, either seated or pacing up and down, until the moment when Clotilde would re-open her door and, putting out her head, decked as queen or peasant girl, according to the part she was playing, would call out: 

“Now you may come back, gentlemen.  Have I been very long?”

Don Jeronimo always lingered.  He was the last to withdraw grumbling and the first to return to the dressing-room.  He was never able to reconcile himself to that modest custom.  And although he never allowed himself to say so openly, yet in the depths of his secret thoughts he regarded it as a lack of courtesy that he should be ejected from his seat, merely because the silly child must change her dress,—­he, who for thirty years had passed his life behind the scenes and had been on intimate terms with every actor and actress, ancient and modern!

He was fifty-four years of age and had been attached to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs ever since he was four-and-twenty.  Each successive government had regarded him as one of the indispensable wheels in the machinery of colonial administration.  Furthermore, he was a bachelor and living at the mercy of his landlady.  It was said that in his youth he once wrote a play which won him nothing but hisses and free entry for life behind the scenes of the theaters.  Whether resigned or not to the verdict of the public, he ceased to write plays and assumed instead the nobler role of patron to unrecognized authors and artists and to ruined managers.

Any youth from the provinces who arrived in Madrid with a drama in his pocket could take no surer road to seeing it produced than that which led to the home of Don Jeronimo.  One and all, he received them with open arms, the good and the bad alike.  There is no denying that, since he was rather brusque in his ways, he never spared the young authors who asked his advice and read him their productions, but criticized vigorously, even to the verge of insult:  “This whole episode is sheer nonsense; spill your ink-well on it!” “Why, look here, for the love of heaven!  How do you suppose that a man who is on the point of committing murder is going to stand there for sixteen seconds, without drawing his breath?” “Lord, what tommyrot!  Platonic love for a woman of that class!  You must have tumbled out of the nest unfledged, my lad!”