Chapter 4

I. ARRIVAL. _CÆSAR IN ACTION_

During the night Cæsar Moncada and Alzugaray chatted in the train. Alzugaray was praising this first Quixotic sally of his friend’s.

“We are going to cross the Rubicon, Cæsar,” he said, as he got into the train.

“We shall see.”

Many times Alzugaray had heard Cæsar explain his plans, but he had no great confidence in their realization. Nor did this particular moment seem to him opportune for beginning the campaign. Everybody believed that the Liberal Ministry was stronger than ever; people were still away for the summer; nothing was doing.

Nevertheless, Cæsar insisted that the crisis was imminent, and that it was the precise moment for him to enter politics. With this object he was taking a letter from Alarcos, the leader of the Conservatives, to Don Calixto García Guerrero.

“Your Don Calixto will be at San Sebastian or at some water-cure,” said Alzugaray, taking his seat in the train.

“It’s all the same to me. I intend to follow him until I find him,” answered Cæsar.

“And you are decided to run as a Conservative?”

“Of course.”

“I hope you won’t be sorry later.”

“Pshaw! Later one jumps into the position that suits one. On these first rungs of political life, either you have to have great luck, or you have to go like a grasshopper, first here, then there. That is the take-off, and when you are there all the ambitious mediocrities unite against you if you have any talent. Naturally, I do not intend to do anything to exhibit mine. Spanish politics are like a pond; a strong, healthy stick of wood goes to the bottom; a piece of bark or cork or a sheaf of straw stays on the surface. One has to disguise oneself as a cork.”

“And later you will go on and make yourself known.”

“Naturally. Since I find myself in the vein for making comparisons, I will say that in Spanish politics we have a case like those in the old comedies of intrigue, where the lackeys pretend to be gentlemen. When I am once among the gentlemen, I shall know how to prove that I am more a master than the people surrounding me.”

“How conceited you are.”

“The confidence one feels in oneself,” said Cæsar ironically.

“But have you really got it, or do you only pretend to have?”

“What matter whether I have it or haven’t it, if I behave as if I had it?”

“It matters a lot. It matters whether you are calm or not in the moment of danger.”

“Calmness is the muse that inspires me. I haven’t it in my thoughts, but in active life you shall see me!”

The two friends stretched themselves out in their first-class compartment, and lay half asleep until dawn, when they got up again.

The train was running rapidly across the flat country; the yellow sunlight shone into the car; through the newly sowed fields rode men on horseback.

“These are not my dominions yet,” said Cæsar.

“We have two more stations till Castro Duro,” responded Alzugaray, consulting the time-table. They took off their caps, put them into the bag, Cæsar put on a fresh collar, and they sat down by the window.

“It is ugly enough, eh?” said Alzugaray.

“Naturally,” replied Cæsar. “What do you want; that there should be some of those green landscapes like in your country, which for my part irritate me?”

THE CLASSIC STAGECOACH

They arrived at Castro Duro. In the station they saw groups of peasants. The travellers with their baggage went out of the station. There were two shabby coaches at the door.

“Are you going to the Comercio?” asked one driver.

“No, they are going to the España,” said the other.

“Then you two know more than we do,” answered Alzugaray, “because we don’t know where to go.”

“To the Comercio!”

“To the España!”

“Whose coach is this one?” asked Cæsar, pointing to the less dirty of the two.

“The Comercio’s.”

“All right, then we are going to the Comercio.”

The coach, in spite of being the better of the two, was a rickety, worn-out old omnibus, with its windows broken and spotted. It was drawn by three skinny mules, full of galls. Cæsar and Alzugaray got in and waited. The coachman, with the whip around his neck, and a young man who looked a bit like a seminarian, began to chat and smoke.

At the end of five minutes’ waiting, Cæsar asked:

“Well, aren’t we going?”

“In a moment, sir.”

The moment stretched itself out a good deal. A priest arrived, so fat that he would have filled the vehicle all alone; then a woman from the town with a basket, which she held on her knees; then the postman got in with his bag; the driver closed the little window in the coach door, and continued joking with the young man who looked a bit like a seminarian and with one of the station men.

“We are in a hurry,” said Alzugaray.

“We are going now, sir. All right. Good-bye!”

“Good-bye!” answered the station man and the seminarian.

The driver got up on his seat, cracked his whip, and the vehicle began to move, with a noisy swaying and a trembling of all its wood and glass. A very thick cloud of dust arose in the road.

“Ya, ya, Coronela!” yelled the driver. “Why do you keep getting where you oughtn’t to get? Damn the mule! Montesina, I am going to give you a couple of whacks. Get on there, Coronela! Get up, get up.... All right! All right!... That’s enough.... That’s enough.... Let it alone, now! Let it alone, now!”

“What an amount of oratory that man is wasting,” exclaimed Cæsar; “he must think that the mules are going to go better for the efforts of his throat. It would be an advantage if he had stronger beasts, instead of these dying ones.”

The other travellers paid no attention to his observation, and Alzugaray said:

“These drivers drip oratory.”

While the shabby coach was going along the highway which encircles Castro hill, to the sound of the bells and the cracking of the whip, it was possible to remain seated in the vehicle with comparative ease; but on reaching the town’s first steep, crooked, rough-cobbled street, the swinging and tossing were such that the travellers kept falling one upon another.

The first street kept getting rapidly narrower, and as it grew narrower, the crags in its paving were sharper and more prominent. At the highest part of the street, in the middle, stood a two-wheeled cart blocking the way. The coachman got down, from his seat and started a long discussion with the carter, as to who was under obligations to make way.

“What idiots!” exclaimed Cæsar, irritated; then, calmer, he murmured, addressing Alzugaray, “The truth is, these people don’t care about doing anything but talk.”

As the discussion between the coachman and the carter gave signs of never ending, Cæsar said:

“Come along,” and then, addressing the man with the bag, he asked him, “Is it far from here to the inn?”

“No; it is right here, in the house where the café is.” THE INN

Sure enough, the inn was only a step away. They went into the damp, dark entrance, up the crooked stairs, and down the corridor to the kitchen.

“Good morning, good morning!” they shouted.

Nobody appeared.

“Might it be on the second floor?” asked Alzugaray.

“Let’s go see.”

They went up to the next floor, entered by a gallery of red brick, which was falling to pieces, and called several times. An old woman, from inside a dark bedroom where she was sweeping, bade them go down to the dining-room, where she would bring them breakfast.

The dining-room had balconies toward the country, and was full of sun; the bedrooms they were taken to, on the other hand, were dark, gloomy, and cavernous. Alzugaray requested the old woman to show them the other vacant chambers, and chose two on the second floor, which were lighter and airier.

The old woman told them she hadn’t wanted to take them there, because there was no paper on the walls.

“No doubt, in Castro, the prospect of bed-bugs is an agreeable prospect,” said Cæsar.

After he had washed and dressed, Cæsar started out to find and capture Don Calixto, and Alzugaray went to take a stroll around the town. It was agreed that they should each explore the region in his own way.

II. CASTRO DURO

THE MORNING

In these severe old Castilian towns there is one hour of ideal peace and serenity. That is the early morning. The cocks are still crowing, the sound of the church bells is scattered on the air, and the sun begins to penetrate into the streets in gusts of light. The morning is a flood of charity that falls upon the yellowish town.

The sky is blue, the air limpid, pure, and diaphanous; the transparent atmosphere scarcely admits effects of perspective, and its ethereal mass makes the outlines of the houses, of the belfries, of the eaves, vibrate. The cold breeze plays at the cross-streets, and amuses itself by twisting the stems of the geraniums and pinks that flame on the balconies. Everywhere there is an odour of cistus and of burning broom, which comes from the ovens where the bread is baked, and an odour of lavender that comes from the house entries.

The town yawns and awakes; some priests pass, on their way to church; pious women come out of their houses; and market men and women begin to arrive from the villages nearby. The bells make that _tilín-talán_ so sad, which seems confined to these dead towns. In the main street the shops open; a boy hangs up the dresses, the sandals, the caps, on the façade, reaching them up with a stick. Droves of mules are seen in front of the grain-shops; some charcoal-burners go by, selling charcoal; and peasant women lead, by their halters, little burros loaded with jars and pans.

One hears all the hawksters’ cries, all the clatter characteristic of that town. The milk-vendor, the honey-vendor, the chestnut-vendor, each has his own traditional theme. The candlestick-maker produces a sonorous peal from two copper candlesticks, the scissors-grinder whistles on his flute....

Then, at midday, hawksters and peasants disappear, the sun shines hotter, and the afternoon is tiresome and enervating.

FROM THE MIRADERO

Castro Duro is situated on a hill of red earth.

One goes up to the town by a dusty highway, with the remains of little trees which one Europeanizing mayor planted, and which all died; or else by zigzag paths, up which saddle-animals and beasts of burden usually go.

From the plain Castro Duro stands out in silhouette against the sky, between two high, many-sided edifices, one of a honey yellow, old and respectable, the church; the other white, overgrown, modern, the prison.

These two pillars of society are conspicuous from all sides, from whatsoever point on the plain one looks at Castro Duro.

The town was an old important city, and has, from afar, a seigniorial air; from nearby, on the contrary, it presents that aspect of caked dust which all the Castilian cities in ruin have; it is wide, spread out, formed for the most part of lanes and little squares, with low crooked houses that have blackish, warped roofs.

From the promenade beside the church, which is called the Miradero, one can see the great valley that surrounds Castro, a plain without an end, flat and empty. At the foot of the hill that supports the city, a broad river, which formerly kissed the old walls, marks a huge S with a sand border.

The water of the river covers the beach in winter, and leaves it half uncovered in summer. At intervals on the river banks grow little groves of poplar, which are mirrored on the tranquil surface of the water. A very long bridge of more than twenty arches crosses from one shore to the other.

The hill that serves as pedestal for the historic city has very different aspects; from one side it is seen terraced into steps, formed of small parcels of land held up by rough stone walls. On these landings there are thickets of vines and a few almond-trees, which grow even out of the spaces between the stones.

On another part of the hill, called the Trenches, the whole ground is broken by great cuttings, which in other days were no doubt used for the defence of the city. Near the trenches are to be seen the remains of battlemented walls, tiles, and ruins of an ancient settlement, perhaps destroyed by the waters of the river which in time undermined its foundations.

From the Miradero one sees the bridge below, as from a balloon, with men, riding horses, and carts going over it, all diminished by the distance. Women are washing clothes and spreading them in the sun, and in the evening horses and herds of goats are drinking at the river brink.

The great plain, the immense flat land, contains cultivated fields, square, oblong, varying in colour with the seasons, from the light green of barley to the gold of wheat and the dirty yellow of stubble. Near the river are truck-gardens and orchards of almonds and other fruit trees.

In the afternoon, looking from the Miradero, from the height where Castro stands, one feels overcome by this sea of earth, by the vast horizon, and the profound silence. The cocks toss their metallic crowing into the air; the clock-bells mark the hours with a sad, slow clang; and at evening the river, brilliant in its two or three fiery curves, grows pale and turns to blue. On clear days the sunset has extraordinary magic. The entire town floats in a sea of gold. The Collegiate church changes from yellow to lemon colour, and at times to orange; and there are old walls which take on, in the evening light, the colour of bread well browned in the oven. And the sun disappears into the plain, and the Angelus bell sounds through the immense space.

THE TOWN

Castro Duro has a great many streets, as many as an important capital. By only circling the Square one can count the Main Street, Laurel Street, Christ Street, Merchants’ Street, Forge Street, Shoemakers’ Street, Loafing Street, Penitence Wall, and Chain Street.

These streets are built with large brick houses and small adobe houses. Pointed cobbles form the pavement, and leave a dirty open sewer in the middle.

The large houses have two granite columns on their facades, on either side of the door, and these columns as well as the stones of the threshold take on a violet tinge from the lees of wine the inhabitants have the custom of putting on the sidewalks to dry.

Many of the big houses in Castro boast a large ‘scutcheon over the door, little crazy towers with iron weather-cocks on the roof; and some of them a huge stork’s nest.

The streets remote from the centre of town have no paving, and their houses are low, built of adobe, and continued by yards, over whose mud-walls appear the branches of fig-trees.

These houses lean forward or backward, and they have worn-out balconies, staircases which hold up through some prodigy of stability, and old grills, crowned with a cross and embellished with big flowers of wrought iron.

The two principal monuments of Castro Duro are the Great Church and the palace.

The Great Church is Romanesque, of a colour between yellow and brown, gilded by the sun. It stands high, at one extremity of the hill, like a sentinel watching the valley. The solid old fabric has rows of crenels under the roof, which shows its warlike character.

The principal dome and the smaller ones are ribbed, like almost all the Romanesque churches of Spain.

The round apse exhibits ornamental half columns, divers rosettes, and a number of raised figures, and masonic symbols. In the interior of the church the most notable thing to be seen is the Renaissance altar-piece and a Romanesque arch that gives entrance to the baptistery.

The second archeological monument of the town is the ancient palace of the Dukes of Castro Duro.

The palace, a great structure of stone and now blackened brick, rises at the side of the town-hall, and has, like it, an arcade on the Square. In the central balcony there are monumental columns, and on top of them two giants of corroded stone, with large clubs, who appear to guard the ‘scutcheon; one end of the building is made longer by a square tower.

The palace wears the noble air given to old edifices by the large spread of wall containing windows very far apart, very small, and very much ornamented.

From the inscriptions on its various escutcheons one can gather that it was erected by the Duke of Castro Duro and his wife, Doña Guiomar.

In the rear of the palace, like a high belvedere built on the rampart, there appears a gallery formed of ten round arches, supported on slender pilasters. Below the gallery are the remains of a garden, with ramps and terraces and a few old statues. The river comes almost to the foot of the gardens.

Today the palace belongs to Don Calixto García Guerrero, Count de la Sauceda.

Don Calixto and his family have no necessity for the whole of this big palace to live in, and have been content to renovate the part fronting on the Calle Mayor. They have had new belvederes built in, and have given over the apartments looking on the Square and the Calle del Cristo to the Courts and the school.

Another great building, which astonishes every one that stops over at Castro Duro, by its size, is the Convent of la Merced. It has been half destroyed by a fire. In the groins there remain some large Renaissance brackets, and in one wing of the edifice, inhabited by the nuns, there are windows with jalousies and a rather lofty tower terminating in a weather-cock and a cross.

LIFE AT CASTRO

Castro Duro is principally a town of farmers and carriers. Its municipal limits are very extensive; the plain surrounding it is fertile enough. In winter there are many foggy days, and then the flat land looks like a sea, in which hillocks and groves float like islands. Wine and cultivated fruits constitute the principal riches of Castro. The wine is sharp, badly made; there is one thick dark variety which always tastes of tar, and one light variety which they reinforce with alcohol and which they call aloque.

Autumn is the period of greatest animation in the town; the harvest gets stowed away, the vintage made, the sweet almonds are gathered and shelled in the porticoes.

Formerly in all the houses of rich and poor, the murk of the grapes was boiled in a still and a somewhat bitter brandy thus manufactured. Whether in consequence of the brandy, or of the unusual amount of money about, or of both, the fact is that at that period a great passion for gambling developed in Castro and more crimes were committed then than during all the rest of the year.

The industrial processes in Castro are primitive; everything is made by hand, and the Castrian people imagine that this establishes a superiority. In the environs of the town there are an electrical plant, a brickyard, various mills, and lime and plaster kilns.

The town’s commerce is more extended than its industries, although no more prosperous. In the Square and in the Calle Mayor, under the arcades white goods are sold and woollens, and there are hat-shops and silversmiths, one alongside the other. The shopkeepers hang their merchandise in the arches, the saddlers and harness-makers decorate their entrances with head-stalls and straps, and those that have no archway put up awnings. In the Square there are continually stalls set up for earthenware jars and pitchers and for articles in tin.

In the outlying streets there are inns, at whose doors five or six mules with their heads together are almost constantly to be seen; there are crockery stores containing brooms and every kind of jug and glazed pan; there are little shops in doorways holding big baskets full of grain; there are dark taverns, which are also eating-houses, to which the peasants go to eat on market days, and whose signs are strings of dried pimentoes and cayenne peppers or an elm branch. In the written signs there is a truly Castilian charm, chaste and serene. At the Riojano oven one reads: “‘Bred’ baked for all ‘commers.’” And at the Campico inn it says: “Wine served by Furibis herself.” The shops and the inns have picturesque names too. There is the Sign of the Moor, and the Sign of the Jew, and the Sign of the Lion, and one of the Robbers.

The streets of Castro, especially those near the centre, where the crowd is greater, are dirty and ill-smelling in summer. Clouds of flies hover about and settle on the pairs of blissfully sleeping oxen; the sun pours down his blinding brilliance; not a soul passes, and only a few greyhounds, white and black, elegant and sad, rove about the streets...

In all seasons, at twilight, a few young gentlemen promenade in the Square. At nine at night in the winter, and at ten in summer, begins the reign of the watchmen with their dramatic and lamentable cry.

* * * * *

Alzugaray gave Cæsar these details by degrees, while they were both seated in the hotel getting ready to dine.

“And the type? The ethnic type? What is it, according to you?” asked Cæsar.

“A type rather thin than fat, supple, with an aquiline nose, black eyes...”

“Yes, the Iberian type,” said Cæsar, “that is how it struck me too. Tall, supple, dolichocephalic... It seems to me one can try to put something through in this town...”

III. CÆSAR’S LABOURS

FIRST STEPS

“And what have you been doing all day? Tell me.”

“I think, my dear Alzugaray,” said Cæsar, “that I can say, like my namesake Julius: ‘Veni, vidi, vice.’”

“The devil! The first day?”

“Yes.”

“Show me. What happened?”

“I left the house and entered the café downstairs. There was no one there but a small boy, from whom I ordered a bottle of beer and asked if there was a newspaper published here. He told me yes, the _Castro Mail_, an independent weekly. I bade him fetch me a copy, even an old one, and he brought me these two. I gave them a glance, and then, as if it didn’t interest me much, I questioned the lad about Don Calixto.

“The first impression I obtained was that Don Calixto is the most influential person in the town; the second, that besides him, either with him or against him, there is a Señor Don Platón Peribáñez, almost as influential as Don Calixto. Afterwards I read the two numbers of the Castro periodical attentively, and from this reading I gathered that there is a somewhat hazy question here about an Asylum, where it seems some irregularities have been committed. There is a Republican book-dealer, who is a member of the Council, and on whom the Workmen’s Club depends, and he has asked for information as to the facts from the Municipality, and the followers of Don Calixto and of Don Platón oppose this suggestion as an attack on the good-birth, the honour, and the reputation of such respectable personages.

“Having verified these pieces of news, which are of interest for me, I packed off to church and heard the whole eleven o’clock mass.”

“Mighty good! You are quite a man.”

“Mass ended, I went over to the Baptistery arch and stood there examining it, as if I felt the most terrible symptoms of enthusiasm for carved stone. Afterwards I went into the big chapel, which serves also as a pantheon for the Dukes of Castro Duro, whose tombs you find in the side niches of the presbytery. These niches are decorated with an efflorescence of Gothic, which is most gay and pretty, and among all this stone filigree you see the recumbent statues of a number of knights and one bishop, who to judge by his sword must have been a warrior too.

“Nobody remained in the church; the priest, a nice old man, fixed his eyes on me and asked me what I thought of the arch. And having prepared my lesson, I talked about the Romanesque of the XII and XIII Centuries like a professor, and then he took me into the sacristy and showed me two paintings on wood which I told him were XV Century.

“‘So they say,’ the priest agreed. ‘Do you think they are Italian or German?’

“‘Italian certainly, North Italian.’ I might as well have said South German, but I had to decide for something.

“‘And they must be worth...? he then asked me with eagerness.

“‘My dear man; according,’ I told him. ‘A dealer would offer you a hundred or two hundred pesetas apiece. In London or New York, well placed, they might be worth twenty or thirty thousand francs.’

“The ‘pater’ shot fire out of his eyes.

“‘And what would one have to do about it?’ he asked me.

“‘My dear man, I think one would have to take some good photographs and send them to various trades-people and to the museums in the United States.’

“‘Would it be necessary to write in English?’

“‘Yes, it would be the most practical thing.’ “‘I don’t think there is anybody here that knows how....’

“‘I would do it, with great pleasure.’

“‘But are you going to be here for some time?’

“‘Yes, it is probable.’

“He asked me what I came to Castro Duro for, and I told him that I had no other object than to visit Don Calixto García Guerrero.

“Astonishment on the priest’s face.

“‘You know him?’

“‘Yes, I met him in Rome.’

“‘Do you know where he lives?’

“‘No.’

“‘Then I will take you.’

“The priest and I went out into the street. He wanted to give me the sidewalk, and I opposed that as if it were a crime. He told me he was more accustomed than I to walking on the cobble-stones; and finally, he on the sidewalk and I in the gutter, we arrived at Don Calixto’s house.”

* * * * *

“Was he at home?” asked Alzugaray.

“Yes,” said Cæsar. “By the way, on the road there we bowed to the present Deputy to the Cortes, he who will be my opponent in the approaching election, Señor García Padilla.”

“Dear man! What a coincidence! What sort is he?”

“He is tall, with a reddish aquiline nose, a greyish moustache, full of cosmetic, a poor type.”

“He is a Liberal?”

“Yes, he is a Liberal, because Don Calixto is a Conservative. In his heart, nothing.”

“Good. Go on.”

_DON CALIXTO AT HOME_

“As I was saying, Don Calixto was at home, in a large room on the ground floor, which serves as his office. Don Calixto is a tall, supple man, with the blackest of hair which is beginning to turn white on the temples, and a white moustache. He is at the romantic age of illusions, of hopes....” “How old is he?” asked Alzugaray.

“He isn’t more than fifty-four,” Cæsar replied, sarcastically. “Don Calixto dresses in black, very fastidiously, and the effect is smart, but smacks of the notary. No matter what pains he takes to appear graceful and easy in manner, he doesn’t achieve the result; he has the inbred humility of one who has taken orders in a shop, either as a lad or as a man.

“Don Calixto received me with great amiability, but with a certain air of reserve, as if to say: ‘In Rome I was a merry comrade to you, here I am a personage.’ We chatted about a lot of things, and before he could ask me what I wanted, I pulled out the letter and handed it to him. The old man put on his glasses, read attentively, and said:

“‘Very good, very good; we will discuss it later.’

“The priest of course thought that he was in the way, and he left.

“When we were alone, Don Calixto said:

“‘All right, Cæsar, I am happy to see you. I see that you remember our conversation in Rome. You must have lunch with me and my family.’

“‘With great pleasure.’

“‘I’ll go and tell them to put on another place.’

“Don Calixto went out and left me alone. For a while I studied the boss’s office. On the wall, diplomas, appointments, in looking-glass frames; a genealogical tree, probably drawn day before yesterday; in a book-case, legal books...

“Don Calixto came back; he asked me if I was tired, and I told him no, and when we had crossed the whole width of the house, which is huge, he showed me the garden. My boy, what a wonderful spot! It hangs over the river and it is a marvel. The highest part, which is the part they keep up, isn’t worth much; it is in lamentable style; just imagine, there is a fountain which is a tin negro that spurts out water from all parts.

“However, the old part of the garden, the lower part, is lovely. There is a big tower standing guard over the river, now converted into a belvedere, with pomegranates, rose-bushes, and climbing plants all around it, and above all, there is an oleander that is a marvel...; it looks like a fire-work castle or a shower of flowers.”

* * * * *

“Leave that point,” said Alzugaray. “You are talking like a poor disciple of Ruskin’s.”

“You are right. But when you see those gardens, you will be enthusiastic, too.”

“Get ahead.”

* * * * *

THE POLITICAL POWERS OF CASTRO

“During our promenade Don Calixto talked to me of the immense good he has done for the town and of the ingratitude he constantly receives for it.

“While I listened, I recalled a little periodical in Madrid which had no other object than to furnish bombs at reasonable prices, and which said, speaking of a manufacturer in Catalonia: ‘Señor So-and-so is the most powerful boss in the province of Tarragona, and even at that there are those who dispute his bossdom.’

“Don Calixto is astonished that when he has done the Castrians the honour to make them loans at eighty or ninety percent, they are not fond of him. After the garden we saw the house; I won’t tell you anything about it, I don’t want you to accuse me again of being a Ruskinian.

“When we reached the dining-room Don Calixto said: ‘I am going to present you to my family.’

“Thereupon, entrance, ceremonies, bows on my part, smiles... _toute la lyre_. Don Calixto’s wife is an insignificant fat woman; the two daughters insipid, ungainly, not at all pretty; and with them was a little girl of about fifteen or sixteen, a niece of Don Calixto’s, a veritable little devil, named Amparo. This Amparo is a tiny, flat-faced creature, with black eyes, and extraordinarily vivacious and mischievous. During dinner I succeeded in irritating the child.

“I talked gravely with Don Calixto and his wife and daughters about Madrid, about the theatrical companies that come to this town, about their acquaintances at the Capital.

“The child interrupted us, bringing us the cat and putting a little bow on him, and then making him walk on the key-board of the piano.

“At half-past one we went to the dining-room. Dinner was kilometres long; and the conversation turned on Rome and Paris. Don Calixto drank more and more, I, too; and at the end of the meal there was a bit of toasting, from which my political intentions were made manifest.

“The elder daughter, whose name is Adela, asked me if I liked music. I told her yes, almost closing my eyes, as if deliriously, and we went into the drawing-room. Without paying attention, I listened, during the horrors of digestion, to a number of sonatas, now and then saying: ‘Magnificent! How wonderful that is!’

“The father was enchanted, the mother enchanted, the sister likewise; the little girl was the one who stared at me with questioning black eyes. She must have been thinking: ‘What species of bird is this?’ I believe the damned child realized that I was acting a comedy.

“About four the ladies and I went out into the garden. Don Calixto has the habit of taking an afternoon nap, and he left us. I succeeded in bringing myself to, in the open air. Don Calixto’s wife showed me over an abandoned part of the house, in which there is an old kitchen as big as a cathedral, with a stone chimney like a high altar, with the arms of the Dukes of Castro. We chatted, I was very pleasant to the mother, courteous to the daughters, and coldly indifferent with the little niece. I was bored, after having exhausted all subjects of conversation, when Don Calixto reappeared and carried me off to his office.

“The conference was important; he explained the situation of the Conservative forces of the district to me. These forces are represented, principally, by three men: Don Calixto, a Señor Don Platón, and a friar. Don Calixto represents the modern Conservative tendency and is, let us say, the Cánovas of the district; with him are the rich members of the Casino, the superior judge, the doctors, the great proprietors, etc. Don Platón Peribáñez, a silversmith in the Calle Mayor, represents the middle-class Conservatives; his people are less showy, but more in earnest and better disciplined; this Platonian or Platonic party is made up of chandlers, silversmiths, small merchants, and the poor priests. The friar, who represents the third Conservative nucleus, is Father Martin Lafuerza. Father Martin is prior of the Franciscan monastery, which was established here after the Order was expelled from Filinas.

“Father Martin is an Ultramontanist up to the eyes. He directs priests, friars, nuns, sisters, and is the absolute master of a town nearby called Cidones, where the women are very pious.

“Despite their piety, the reputation of those ladies cannot be very good, because there is a proverb, certainly not very gallant: ‘Don’t get either a wife or a mule at Cidones; neither a wife nor a mule nor a pig at Griñón.’

“Opposed to these three Conservative nuclei are the friends of the present Deputy, who amount to no more than the official element, which is always on the ruling side, and a small guerilla band that meets in the Workingmen’s Casino, and is composed principally of a Republican bookseller, an apothecary who invents explosives, also Republican, an anarchist doctor, a free-thinking weaver, and an innkeeper whom they call Furibis, who is also a smuggler and a man with hair on his chest.”

_DON PLATÓN PERIBÁÑEZ_

“After having given me these data, Don Calixto told me that by counting on Señor Peribáñez, the election was almost sure; and since the quicker things go the better, he proposed that we should go to see him, and I immediately agreed.

“Don Platón Peribáñez has a silver-shop fitted up in the old style; a small show-window, full of rattles, Moorish anklets, necklaces, little crosses, et cetera; a narrow, dark shop, then a long passage, and at the rear, a workroom with a window on a court.

“As his assistant in the silver-shop, Don Platón has a boy who is a nonsuch. I believe that if you took him to London and exhibited him, saying beforehand: ‘Bear in mind, gentlemen, that this is not a monkey or an anthropoid, but a man,’ you would rake in a mad amount of pounds sterling.

“We went into Don Platón’s little shop, we asked the young macaco for him, and we passed on into the workshop.

“Señor Peribáñez is a man of medium stature, dressed in black, with a trimmed white beard, grey eyes, and modest manners. He speaks coldly, thinks closely of what he is saying; he has a monotonous, slow voice, and nothing escapes him.

“Don Calixto presented me to him; the silversmith gave me his hand as if with a certain repugnance, and the boss explained who I was and what I was after.

“Don Platón said that he could not reply categorically without consulting with his friends and with Father Martín. The Father has other candidates; one the Duke of Castro himself; and the other a rich farmer of the town.

“The Duke of Castro presents no other drawback than that he has been arrested in Paris for an insignificant swindle he has committed; but it seems that a rich Cuban wants to get him out of his difficulties on condition that he will marry his daughter.

“If he comes out of jail and gets married, then they will nominate him as Deputy from here.

“I said to Don Platón, in case the worthy Duke does not come out of jail, would he have difficulties over my being his candidate. He replied that I am very young, and after many circumlocutions he said flatly that he doesn’t know if I would be accepted or not as a candidate by his followers; but in case I were, the conditions precedent would be: first, that I would not interfere in any way in the affairs of the district, which would be ventilated in the town, as previously; secondly, that I should bear the costs of the election, which would amount approximately to some ten thousand pesetas.

“Don Calixto looked at me questioningly, and I smiled in a way to make it understood that I agreed, and after extracting a promise from Don Platón that he will give us a definite answer this week, we took leave of him and went to the Casino.

“There I was introduced to the judge, an Andalusian who has a spotless reputation for veniality, and to the mayor, who is a rich farmer; and the most important persons of the town being thus gathered at one table, we chatted about politics, women, and gambling.

“I told them a number of tales; I told them that I once lost ten thousand dollars at Monte Carlo, playing with two Russian princes and a Yankee millionairess; I talked to them about the mysteries and crimes of gambling houses and of those great centres of pleasure, and I left them speechless. At half-past nine, with a terrible headache, I came back here. I think I have not lost a day, eh?”

“No! The devil! What speed!” exclaimed Alzugaray.

“But you are not eating any supper. Don’t you intend to take anything?”

“No. I am going to see if I can sleep. Listen, day after tomorrow we are both invited to dine at Don Calixto’s.”

“Me, too?”

“Yes; I told them that you are a rich tourist, and they want to know you.”

“And what am I to do there?”

“You can study these people, as an entomologist studies insects. Listen, it wouldn’t do any harm if you took a walk to that town near here, named Cidones, to see if you can find out what sort of bird this Father Martin is.”

“All right.”

“And if you don’t mind, go into that Republican bookseller’s shop, under any pretext, and talk to him.”

“I will do so.”

“Then, till tomorrow!”

“You are going now?”

“Yes.”

“Goodnight, then.”

Cæsar left his room and marched off to sleep.

IV. THE BOOKSELLER AND THE ANARCHISTS

The following day, very early in the morning, Alzugaray went to a livery-stable which they had directed him to at the hotel, and asked to hire a horse. They brought him a large, old one; he mounted, and crossed the town more slowly than if he had been on foot, and set out for Cidones.

On reaching that town, he left the horse at a blacksmith’s and went up through the narrow lanes of Cidones, which are horribly long, dark, and steep.

Then he ascended to la Peña, the rock on which the Franciscan monastery stands; but was unable to obtain any fresh information about Father Martin and his friars. The people with whom he talked were not disposed to unbosom themselves, and he preferred not to insist, so as not to be suspected.

Afterwards he went down to Cidones again and returned to Castro Duro. Cæsar was still in bed. Alzugaray went into his room.

“Don’t you intend to get up?” he asked him.

“No.”

“Don’t you intend to eat, either?”

“Neither.”

“Are you sick?”

“No.”

“What is the matter with you? Laziness?”

“Something like that.”

Alzugaray ate alone, and after he had had coffee, he directed his steps to the bookstore of the Republican councilman, of whom Cæsar had spoken to him. He found it in a corner of the Square; and it was at the same time a stationer’s shop and a newsdealer’s. Behind the counter were an old man and a lad.

Alzugaray went in. He bought various Madrid periodicals from the lad, and then addressing the old man, asked him:

“Haven’t you some sort of a map of the province, or of the neighbourhood of Castro Duro?”

“No, sir, there isn’t one.”

“Nor a guidebook, perhaps?”

“Nor that either. At the townhall we have a map of the town....”

“Only of the part built up?”

“Yes.”

“Then it would do me no good.”

“You want a map for making excursions, eh?”

“That’s it. Yes.”

“Well, there is none. We are very much behind the times.”

“Yes, that’s true. It wouldn’t cost very much, and it would be useful for ever, both to the people here and to strangers.”

“Just tell that to our town government!” exclaimed the old bookseller. “Whatever is not for the advantage of the rich and the clerical element, there is no hope of.”

“Those gentlemen have a great deal of influence here?” asked Alzugaray.

“Uf! Enormous. More every day.”

“But there don’t appear to be many convents.”

“No, there are not many convents; but there is one that counts for a hundred, and that is the one at Cidones.”

“Why is that?”

“Because it has a wild beast for a prior. Father Martín Lafuerza. He is famous all through this region. And he is a man of talent, there’s no denying it, but despotic and exigent. He is into everything, catechizes the women, dominates the men. There is no way to fight against him. Here am I with this bookshop, and I have my pension as a lieutenant, which gives me enough to live very meanly, and with what little I get out of the periodicals I scrape along. Besides, I am a Republican and very liberal, and I like propaganda. If I didn’t, I should have left all this long ago, because they have waged war to the death on me, an infamous sort of war which a person that lives in Madrid cannot understand; calumnies that come from no one knows where, atrocious accusations, everything....”

Alzugaray stared at the bookseller’s grey eyes, which were extraordinarily bright. The old man was tall, stooped, grizzled, with a prominent nose and a beard trimmed to a point.

“But you have stuck firmly to your post,” said Alzugaray.

“Having been a soldier must do something for a man,” replied the bookseller. “He learns not to draw back in the face of danger. And this is my life. Now I am a councillor and I work at the town hall as much as I can, even though I know I shall accomplish nothing. Grafting goes on before my face, I know it exists, and yet it is impossible to find it. Six months ago I informed the judge of irregularities committed in a Sisters’ Asylum, things I had proof of.... The judge laid my information on the table, and things went on as if nothing had happened.”

“Spain is in a bad way. It is a pity!” exclaimed Alzugaray.

“You people in Madrid, and I don’t say this to irritate you, do not understand what goes on in the small towns.”

“My dear man, I have never taken any part in political affairs.”

“Well, I think that everybody ought to take part in politics, because it is for the general interest.”

At this moment two persons entered the bookshop. Alzugaray was going to leave, but the bookseller said to him:

“If you have nothing to do, sit down for a while.”

Alzugaray sat down and examined the new arrivals. One of them was a skinny man, with bushy hair and whiskers; the other was a smooth-shaven party, short, cross-eyed, dressed in copper-coloured cloth edged with broad black braid.

“_The Rebel_ hasn’t come?” asked the whiskered one.

“No,” replied the bookseller. “It didn’t come out this week.”

“They must have reported it,” said the whiskered one. “Yes, probably.”

“Has the doctor been in?” the shaven, little man with the black braid asked in his turn.

“No.”

“All right. Let’s go see if we can find him in the club. Salutations!”

“Good-bye.”

“Who are those rascals?” asked Alzugaray, when they had gone out.

“They are two anarchists that we have here, who accuse me of being a bourgeois... ha... ha.... The shaven one is the son of the landlady of an inn who is called Furibis, and they call him that too. He used to be a Federalist. They call the other one ‘Whiskers,’ and he came here from Linares, not long ago.”

“What do they do?”

“Nothing. They sit in the club chatting, and nowadays the doctor we have here runs with them, Dr. Ortigosa, who is half mad. He will be in soon. Then you will see a type. He is a very bad-tempered man, and is always looking for an excuse to quarrel. But above all, he is an enemy of religion. He never says Good-bye, but Salutations or Farewell. In the same way, he doesn’t say Holy Week, but Clerical Week. His great pleasure is to find a temperament of a fibre like his own; then his eyes flash and he begins to swear. And if he is hit, he stands for it.”

“He is an anarchist, too?”

“How do I know? He doesn’t know himself. Formerly, for four or five months, he got out a weekly paper named _The Protest_, and sometimes he wrote about the canalization of the river, and again about the inhabitants of Mars.”

The bookseller and Alzugaray chatted about many other things, and after some while the bookseller said:

“Here is Dr. Ortigosa. He is coming in.”

The door opened and a slim individual appeared, worn and sickly, with a black beard and spectacles. His necktie was crooked, his suit dirty, and he had his hat in his hand. He stared impertinently at Alzugaray, cast a glance at a newspaper, and set to shouting and talking ill of everything.

“This is a town full of dumb beasts,” he said from time to time, with the energy of exasperation.

Then, supposing Alzugaray to come from Madrid, he started to speak ill of the Madrileños.

“They are a collection of fools,” he said roundly, various times. “They know nothing, they understand nothing, and still they talk authoritatively about everything.”

Alzugaray put up with the downpour as if it had no reference to him, looking over a newspaper; and when the doctor was in the thick of his discourse, Alzugaray got up, shook hands with the bookseller, thanked him, and left the shop.

The doctor looked at him over his glasses with fury, and began to walk up and down in the bookstore.

Alzugaray went to the hotel, arranging in his memory the data collected.

Cæsar was feeling well, and the two of them talked of the bookseller and his friends and of Father Martin Lafuerza.

“I am going to jot down all these points,” said Cæsar. “It wouldn’t be a bad idea for you to go on cultivating the bookseller.”

“I am going to.”

“Tomorrow, you know,” said Cæsar. “Grand dinner at Don Calixto’s. The practical manoeuvres begin.”

“Very good.”

V. THE BANQUET

THE GUESTS

The table had been set in that wonderful gallery of the ancient palace of the Dukes of Castro Duro, which looked out over the garden. The early autumn weather was of enchanting softness and sweetness.

Cæsar and Alzugaray were very smart and elegant, with creases in their trousers: Cæsar dressed in black, with the ceremonious aspect that suits a grave man; Alzugaray in a light suit with a coloured handkerchief in his breast pocket.

“I think we are ‘gentlemen’ today,” said Cæsar.

“It seems so to me.”

They entered the house and were ushered into the drawing-room. The majority of the guests were already there; the proper introductions and bows took place. Cæsar stayed in the group of men, who remained standing, and Alzugaray went over to enter the sphere of Don Calixto’s wife and the judge’s wife.

The judge, from the first moment, treated Cæsar like a man of importance, and began to call him Don Cæsar every moment, and to find everything he said, good.

In the ladies’ group there was an old priest, a tall, big, deaf man, a great friend of the family, named Don Ramón.

The judge’s wife told Alzugaray that this Don Ramón was a simpleton.

He was the pastor of a very rich hermitage nearby, the hermitage of la Vega, and he had spent all the money he had got by an inheritance, in fixing up the church.

The poor man was childlike and sweet. He said various times that he had many cloaks for the Virgin in the sacristy of his church, and that he wished they could be given to poor parishes, because two or three were enough in his.

AMPARITO

While they were talking an automobile horn was heard, and a little later Don Calixto’s niece entered the drawing-room.

This was Amparito, the flat-faced girl with black eyes, of whom Cæsar had spoken to Alzugaray. Her father accompanied her.

The priest patted the girl’s cheeks.

Her father was a clumsy man, red, sunburned, with the face of a contractor or a miner.

The girl took off her cap and the veil she wore in the automobile, and seated herself between Don Calixto’s daughters. Alzugaray looked her over. Amparito really was attractive; she had a short nose, bright black eyes, red lips too thick, white teeth, and smooth cheeks. She wore her hair down, in ringlets; but in spite of her infantile get-up, one saw that she was already a woman.

“Cæsar is right; this is quite a lively girl,” murmured Alzugaray.

The mayor’s son now arrived, and his sister. He was an insignificant little gentleman, mild and courteous; he had studied law at Salamanca, and it seemed that he had certain intentions about Don Calixto’s second daughter.

All the guests being assembled, the master of the house said that, since nobody was missing and it was time, they might pass into the gallery, where the table was set.

At one end the lady of the house seated herself, having the priest on one side and the judge on the other; at the other end, Don Calixto, between the judge’s wife and the mayor’s daughter. Cæsar had a seat assigned between Don Calixto’s elder daughter and Amparito, and Alzugaray one between the second daughter and the judge’s girl.

A few moments before they sat down, Amparito went running out of the gallery into the garden. “Where has that child gone?” asked Don Calixto’s wife.

“Something or other has occurred to her,” said Amparito’s father, laughing.

The girl reappeared a little later with a number of yellow and red chrysanthemums in her hand.

She gave red ones to the mayor’s daughter and to her cousins, who were all three brunettes, and a yellow one to the judge’s daughter, who was blond. Then she proceeded to the men.

“This one is for you,” to the mayor’s son; “this one for you,” and she gave Alzugaray a yellow one; “this one for you,” and she gave Cæsar a red one; “and this one for me,” and she put a similar flower in her bosom.

“And the rest of us?” asked Don Calixto.

“I don’t give you chrysanthemums, because your wives would be jealous,” replied Amparito.

“Man, man!” exclaimed the judge; “how does it strike you, Don Calixto? That these little girls know the human heart pretty well?”

“These children do not know how to appreciate our merits,” said Don Calixto.

“Oh, yes; your merits are for your wives,” replied Amparito.

“I must inform you that my friend Cæsar is married, too,” said Alzugaray, laughing.

“Pshaw!” she exclaimed, smiling and showing her white, strong teeth. “He hasn’t the face of a married man.”

“Yes, he has got the face of a married man. Look at him hard.”

“Very well; as his wife isn’t here, she won’t quarrel with me.”

Alzugaray examined this girl. She had great vivacity; any idea that occurred to her was reflected in her face in a manner so lively and charming, that she was an interesting spectacle to watch.

At first the conversation was of a languid and weary character; Don Calixto, the judge, and Cæsar started in to exchange political reflexions of crass vulgarity. Cæsar was gallantly attentive to the wants of Don Calixto’s elder daughter, and less gallantly so to his other neighbour Amparito; the mayor’s son, despite the fact that his official mission was to court one of Don Calixto’s girls, looked more at Amparito than at his intended, and Alzugaray listened smilingly to the young person’s sallies.

Toward the middle of the meal the conversation grew brisker; the judge recounted, with much art, a mysterious crime that had occurred in a town in Andalusia among farming people, and he succeeded in keeping them all hanging to his lips.

At the end of the recital, the conversation became general; the younger element talked together, and Cæsar made comments about what the judge had told them, and defended the most immoral and absurd conclusions, as though they were Conservative ideas.

Cæsar’s observations were discussed by the men, and the judge and Don Calixto agreed that Cæsar was a man of real talent, who would play a great role in Congress.

“Please give me a little wine,” said Amparito, holding her glass to Alzugaray; “your friend pays no attention to me; I have asked him for some wine twice, and nothing doing.”

Cæsar acted as if he hadn’t heard and kept on talking.

Amparito took the glass, wet her lips in it, and looked at Alzugaray maliciously.

After eating and having coffee, as the two married ladies and the girls were inert from so long a meal, they arose, and Alzugaray, the mayor’s son, and Amparito’s father followed them. Don Calixto, the judge, and Cæsar remained at table. The priest had gone to sleep.

A bottle of chartreuse was brought, and they started in drinking and smoking.

Cæsar’s throat grew dry and he became nauseated from drinking, smoking, and talking.

At five the judge took his leave, because he had to glance in at court; Don Calixto wanted to take his nap, and after he had escorted Cæsar to the garden, he went away. The two married ladies were alone, because the young people had gone with Amparito’s father on an excursion to the Devil’s Threshold, a defile where the river flows between some red precipitous rocks full of clefts.

Cæsar joined the two ladies, and kept up a monotonous, dreary conversation about the ways of the great city.

At twilight all the excursionists came back from their jaunt. One of the young ladies played something very noisy on the piano, and the judge’s daughter was besought to recite one of Campoamor’s poems.

“It is a very pretty thing,” said the judge’s wife, “a girl who laments because her lover abandons her.”

“Given the customs of Spain, as they are, the girl would be in a house of prostitution,” said Cæsar in a low tone, ironically.

“Shut up,” replied Alzugaray.

The girl recited the poem, and Cæsar asked Alzugaray sarcastically if those verses were by the girl’s father, because they sounded to him like the verses of a notary or a judge of the Court of First Instance.

Then somebody suggested that they should have supper there.

Cæsar noticed that this plan did not appeal to the mistress of the house, and he said:

“One should be moderate in all things. I am going home to bed.”

After this somewhat pedantic phrase, which to Don Calixto seemed a pearl, Cæsar took leave of his new acquaintances with a great deal of ceremony and coolness. Alzugaray said he would remain a while longer.

When Cæsar was bowing to Amparito, she asked him jokingly:

“Is it your wife that keeps you in such good habits?”

“My wife!” exclaimed Cæsar, surprised.

“Didn’t your friend say...”

“Ah! Yes, it is she who makes me have such good habits.”

This said, he left the drawing-room and went quickly down the stairs. The cool night air made him shiver, and he went with a heavy, aching head to his hotel, and got to bed. He slept very profoundly, but not for more than an hour, and woke up sweaty and thirsty. His headache was gone. It was not yet past eleven. He lighted the light, and sitting up in bed, set to thinking over the probabilities of success in his undertaking.

Meanwhile he stared at the red chrysanthemum which was in the button-hole of his coat, and remembered Amparito.

“That child is a prodigy of coquetry and bad bringing-up,” he thought with vexation; “these emancipated small town young ladies are more unattractive than any others. I prefer Don Calixto’s daughter, who at least is naively and unobjectionably stupid. But this other one is unsupportable.”

Without knowing why, he felt more antipathy for the girl than was natural under the circumstances. He did not like to admit it to himself; but he felt the hostility which is produced in strong, self-willed characters by the presence of another person with a strong character proposing to exert itself.

THE TWO FRIENDS’ COMMENTS

Cæsar was thinking over the details of the visit, when Alzugaray came home, and seeing a light in Cæsar’s room, went in there. Alzugaray was quite lively. The two friends passed the persons met that day in ironic review, and in general they were agreed about everything, except about valuing Amparito’s character.

Cæsar found her distasteful, pert and impertinent; to his friend, on the contrary, she had seemed very attractive, very amiable and very clever.

“To me,” said Cæsar, “she appears one of these small town lasses who have a flirtation with a student, then with a captain, and finally marry some rich brute, and get fat, and turn into old sows, and grow moustaches.”

“In that I think you are fundamentally unjust,” said Alzugaray. “Amparito is not a small town lass, for she lives in Madrid almost all year. Besides, that makes no difference; what I have not observed is her committing any folly or impertinence.” “Dear man, it all depends on how you look at it. To me her conduct seemed bad, to you it seems all right.”

“You are an extremist, for I can assure you that you were actually rude to her.”

“Actually rude, I don’t think; but I admit that I was cool and not very amiable.”

“And why were you?”

“First, because it is politic of me, since Don Calixto’s family do not care for Amparito; and secondly, because the little creature didn’t please me, either.”

“And why didn’t she please you? For no reason at all?”

“I am not partial to the platyrrhine races.”

“What nonsense! And you wish to look at things clearly! A man that judges people by their noses!”

“It seems to you little to go on? A brunette girl, brachicephalic and rather platyrrhine.... There is no more to say.”

“And if she had been blond, dolichocephalic, and long-nosed, she would have seemed all right to you.”

“Her ethnic type would have seemed all right.”

“Let’s not discuss it. What’s the use? But I feel that you are arbitrary to an extreme.”

“If she knew of our discussion, the young thing couldn’t complain, because if she has had a systematic detractor in me, she has found an enthusiastic defender in you.”

“Yes, dear man; it is only at such long intervals that I see a person with ingenuousness and enthusiasm, that when I do meet one, I get a real joy from it.”

“You are a sentimentalist.”

“That’s true; and you have become an inquisitor.”

“Most certainly. I believe we agree on that and on all the rest.”

“I think so. All right. Good-bye!” said Alzugaray, ill-humouredly.

“Salutations!” replied Cæsar.

VI. UNCLE CHINAMAN

CIDONES

Cæsar impatiently awaited Señor Peribáñez’s reply, so that he might return to Madrid. He was fed up with Don Calixto’s conversation and his wife’s, and with the familiarity they had established with him.

Alzugaray, on the other hand, was entertained and content. Amparito’s father showed a great liking for him and took him everywhere in his automobile.

Cæsar, in order to satisfy his requirements for isolation, had begun to get up very early and take walks on the highway. He almost always walked too far, and was done up for the whole day, and at first he slept badly at night.

He wanted to see, one by one, the parts of his future realm, the scene where his initiative was to bear seed and his plans to be realized.

A lot of ideas occurred to him: to build a bridge here, to take advantage there of the fall of the river and establish a big electric plant for industrial purposes. He would have liked to change everything he saw, in an instant.

To think of these sleeping forces irritated him: the waterfall, lost without leaving its energy anywhere; the ravine, which might be transformed into an irrigation reservoir; the river, which was flowing gently without fertilizing the fields; the land around the hermitage, which might have been converted into a park, with a bright, gay schoolhouse; all these things that could be done and were not done, seemed to him more real than the people with whom he talked and lived.

One morning Cæsar walked to Cidones; the sun shone strongly on the highway, and he reached the town choked and thirsty.

The streets of Cidones were so narrow, so cold and damp, that Cæsar shivered on entering the first one, and he turned back, and instead of going inside that polypus of dark clefts, he walked around it by the road. On a small house with an arbour, which was on a corner, he saw a sign saying: ‘Café Español’; and went in.

THE CAFÉ ESPAÑOL. The café was dark and completely empty, but at one end there was a balcony where the sun entered. Cæsar crossed the café and sat down near the balcony.

He called several times, and clapped his hands, and a girl appeared.

“What do you want?” she asked.

“Something to drink. A bottle of beer.”

“I will call Uncle Chinaman.”

The girl went out, and soon after a thick, chubby man came in, with a bottle of beer in his hand, the label of which he showed to Cæsar, asking him if that was what he wanted.

“Yes, sir; that will do very well.”

The man opened the bottle with his corkscrew, put it on the table, and as he seemed to have a desire to enter into conversation, Cæsar asked him:

“Why did the girl tell me that Uncle Chinaman would come? Who is the Chinaman?”

“The Chinaman, or Uncle Chinaman, as you like; I am.”

“My dear man!”

“Yes, we all have nicknames here. They called my father that, and they call me that. Psh! It makes no difference. Because if a person is cross about it, it’s all the worse. A few days ago a muleteer from a town in the district arrived here, and went to the inn, and as he had no nickname and they are very fond here in Cidones of giving one to every living creature, they said to him: ‘No matter how short a while you stay here, you will be given a nickname’; and he answered contemptuously: ‘Bah! Little fear.’ Soon after, as he was crossing the square, a girl said to him: ‘Good-bye, Little Fear!’ and Little Fear it remained.”

As Uncle Chinaman seemed very communicative, Cæsar asked him some questions about life in the town.

Uncle Chinaman talked a great deal and with great clearness. According to him, the cause of all trouble in the town was cowardice. The two or three bosses of Castro and Father Martin ruled their party arbitrarily, and the rest of the people didn’t dare breathe.

The poor didn’t understand that by being united they could offset the influence of the rich, and even succeed in dominating them. Besides, fear didn’t permit them to move.

“But fear of what?” said Cæsar.

“Fear of everything; fear that they will levy a tax, that they won’t provide work, that they will take your son for a soldier, that they will put you in jail for something or other, that the two or three bullies who are in the bosses’ service might beat you.”

“Does their tyranny go as far as that?”

“They do whatever they choose.”

The Chinaman, who looked more like a Tartar, could make himself quite clear. If it had not been that he used the wrong words and had an itch for unusual ones, he would have given the impression of being a most intelligent man.

He said he was anti-clerical, declared himself a pantheist, and spoke of the “controversories” he maintained with different persons.

“A relative of mine who is a monk,” he said, “is always reprehending me, and saying: ‘Lucas, you are a Free-Thinker.’... ‘And it’s greatly to my credit,’ I tell him.”

Then, apropos of his monkish relative, he told a scandalous story. A niece of the Chinaman’s, who had served for some while in the café, had gone to live with this monk.

Uncle Chinaman’s account of it was rather grotesque.

“I had a niece,” he said, “in the house, you know, very spruce, very good-looking, with breasts as hard as a rock. My wife loved her as ‘muchly’ as if she had been our daughter, and so did I. Suddenly we heard the poor child had made a false step... or two false steps... and a little while later the girl was in a bad condition. Well, then; she went to town, and came back here to the café, and again we heard that the poor child had made a false step... or two false steps; and as I have daughters, you know, this ‘pro... missiousness’ didn’t please me, and I went and told her: ‘Look here, Maria, this isn’t right at all, and what you ought to do is get out.’ She understood me, and went away, and went to her uncle the monk, and the two of them formed a ‘cohabit.’... Curse her! I went after them; and if I ever find them, I’ll kill them. All very well for the poor child to make a false step... or two false steps; but this thing of getting into a ‘cohabit’ with a monk, and he her uncle, that is a ‘hulimination’ for the family. You may believe that we had to empty the cup down to the ‘drugs.’”

FATHER MARTIN

Cæsar was listening to Uncle Chinaman with joy, when he saw two friars passing along the road below the balcony.

“They are from the monastery of la Peña, I suppose,” he said.

The Chinaman looked out and replied:

“One of them is the prior, Father Lafuerza. The other is an intriguing young chap who has been here only a short while.”

“Man, I have to see them,” said Cæsar.

“They are coming up the street now.”

Uncle Chinaman and Cæsar went to the other end of the café, and waited for them to pass.

The younger of the two friars had an air of mock humility, and was weakly-looking, with a straggling yellowish beard and a crafty expression; Father Martin, on the contrary, looked like a pasha parading through his dominions. He was tall, stout, of an imposing aspect, with a grizzly blond beard, blue eyes, and a straight, well-shaped nose.

The two friars came up the narrow, steep street, stopping to talk to the women that were sewing and embroidering in the arcades.

Cæsar and the Chinaman followed them with their eyes until the two friars turned a corner. Then Cæsar left the café and walked back to Castro Duro.

VII. A TRYING SCENE

Don Platón Peribáñez’s reply was delayed longer than he had promised. No one knew whether the Duke of Castro Duro would get married or not get married, whether he would come out of prison or stay in.

Cæsar had nothing for it but to wait, although he was already fed up with his stay. Alzugaray had a good time; he visited the surrounding towns in the company of Amparito and her father. Cæsar, on the other hand, began to be bored. Accustomed to live with the independence of a savage, the social train of a town like Castro irritated him.

His good opinion of people was in direct ratio to the indifference they felt for him. Amparito’s father was one of those who showed most antipathy. Sometimes he invited him to go motoring, but only for politeness. Cæsar used to reply to these invitations with a courteous refusal.

Amparito, who was doubtless accustomed to seeing everybody in town fluttering about her, was wounded at this indifference and took every chance to see Cæsar, and then shot her wit at him and was sharply impertinent.

The young creature was more intelligent than she had at first appeared and she spoke very plainly.

Cæsar could not permit a young girl to make fun of him and combat his ideas for her own amusement.

“Let’s see, Moneada,” Amparito said to him one day in the gallery at Don Calixto’s. “What are your political plans?”

“You wouldn’t understand them,” replied Cæsar.

“Why not? Do you think I am so stupid?”

“No. It is merely that politics are not a matter for children.” “Ah! But how old do you think I am?” she asked.

“You must be twelve or thirteen.”

“You are a malicious joker, Señor Moncada, You know that I am almost seventeen.”

“I don’t. How should I know it?”

“Because I told your friend Alzugaray....”

“All right, but I don’t ask my friend what you have told him.”

“It doesn’t interest you? Very good. You are very polite. But your politics do interest me. Come on, tell me. What reforms do you intend to make in the town? What improvements are you going to give the inhabitants? For I warn you, Señor Moncada, that they are all going to vote against you otherwise, I will tell my father.”

“I don’t believe his political interest is so keen.”

“It is keen enough, and my father will do what I tell him. My father says that you are ambitious.”

“If I were, I should make love to you, because you are rich.”

“And do you suppose I would respond?”

“I don’t know, but I should try it, as others do; and you can see that I don’t try.”

Amparito bit her lips and said ironically:

“Are you reserving yourself for my cousin Adelaida?”

“I am not reserving myself for anybody.”

“We couldn’t say that you are very amiable.”

“That is true. I never have been.”

“If you keep on like that when you are a Deputy....”

“What difference is it to you whether I am a Deputy or not? Is it because you have some beau who wants the place? If it is, tell me. I will withdraw in his favour. You must see that I can do no more,” said Cæsar jokingly.

“And how you would hate me then; if you had to give up being a Deputy on my account!”

“No.”

“You hate me already.”

“No. You are mistaken.” “Yes. I believe if you could, you would strike me.”

“No, the most I should do would be to shut you up in a dark room.”

“You are an odious, antipathetic man. I thought I rather liked you, but I only hate you.”

“You know already, Amparito, that I am a candidate for Deputy, but not one for you.”

“All right. All right. I don’t wish to hear any more stupid remarks.”

“The stupid remarks are those you are making.”

And Cæsar, who was beginning to feel angry, rebuked Amparito too severely, for her coquetry, her bad intentions, and her desire to humiliate and mortify people without any reason.

Amparito listened to him, pale and panting.

“And after all,” said Cæsar, “all this is nothing to me. If I am in your family’s way, or even in your way, I can go away from here, and all is ended.”

“No, do not go away,” murmured Amparito, raising her handkerchief to her eyes and beginning to weep bitterly.

Cæsar felt deeply grieved; all his anger disappeared, and he stood there, amazed, and not knowing what to do.

“Do not cry,” exclaimed Cæsar; “what will they think of me? Come, don’t cry. It is childish.”

At that moment Amparito’s father entered the gallery, and he came running to the girl’s side.

“What have you done to my daughter?” he cried, approaching Cæsar threateningly.

“I, nothing,” he said.

“You have. What has he done to you?” screamed the father.

“Nothing, Papa. Do not shriek that way, for God’s sake,” moaned Amparito; “I was entirely to blame.”

“If he...”

“No, I tell you he hasn’t done anything to me.”

Cæsar, who had remained motionless in face of Amparito’s father’s threatening attitude, turned on his heel, and went slowly out. THE ETERNAL GAME OF DISDAIN

Cæsar went back to the hotel, thinking very hard. Alzugaray asked him what the matter was, and Cæsar told his friend what had happened in the gallery. On hearing the story Alzugaray assumed a look of deep desolation.

“I don’t understand what is the matter with the girl, for her to show such antipathy for me,” Cæsar concluded.

“It is very simple,” said Alzugaray, sadly; “the girl is interested in you. The eternal game of disdain has produced its effect. She has seen you show yourself indifferent toward her, speak curtly to her, and she has gone on thinking more and more about you, and now she thinks of nothing else. That is what has happened.”

“Bah! I don’t believe it. You act as if this were in a novel.”

“It’s no novel. It’s the truth.”

The next day, when Cæsar got up, the maid handed him two letters. One was from Don Calixto and said that Señor Peribáñez accepted him as candidate. It had been learned that the Duke of Castro Duro had married his landlady in England; the arrangement with the Cuban gentleman was impossible, and the poor Duke would definitely have to winter in Paris, in the prison, along with the distinguished apaches, Bibi de Montmartre and the Panther of the Batignolles.

The other letter was from Amparito.

Don Calixto’s niece told him he mustn’t believe that she hated him; if she had said anything to him, it was without bad intention; she would be very happy if all his projects were realized.

Despite his ambitious plans and the desire he had that the question of his candidacy should be definitely settled, Amparito’s letter interested him much more than Don Calixto’s.

A new, disturbing element was coming into his life, without any warning and without any reason. He said nothing about Amparito’s letter to his friend Alzugaray. He felt him to be a rival, and in spite of having no intentions of going further, the idea of rivalry between them troubled him. He did not wish to offend him by taking the attitude of a lucky man.

He went out into the street and set off for a walk on the highway.

“It is strange,” he thought, “this coarse psychology, which proves that a man and a woman, especially a woman, are not complex beings, but stupidly simple. The complex thing in a woman is not the intelligence or the soul, but instinct. Why does a woman rebuff a man who pleases her? For the same reason that the female animal repulses the male, and at the same time calls him to her.

“And this instinctive love, this mixture of hatred and attraction, is the curious thing, the enigmatic thing about human nature. The intellect of each individual is, by contrast, so poor, so clear!

“This girl, rich and attractive, flattered by everybody, is bored in this town. She sees a man that doesn’t pay attention to her, who is after another goal, and simply for that reason she feels offended and hunts out a way to mortify him, for her entertainment and for spite; and when she finds that she doesn’t succeed, she gets to thinking about him all the time.

“And this spite, this wounded vanity, is changed to an absorbing interest. Why shouldn’t that absorbing interest be called love? Yes, she is in love, and finds great satisfaction in thinking so.

“She is not an insignificant girl, daughter of a commonplace gentleman; to herself, she is a romantic figure. She seems to be absorbed in another, and what is really the case is that she is absorbed in herself. How ridiculous this all is!... And this is life. Is the whole of life nothing, in reality, but ridiculous?”

Cæsar returned home, and unknown to Alzugaray, wrote a letter to Amparito. He put the letter into the box, and then went to call on Don Calixto, and take leave of him. Don Calixto invited Cæsar and Alzugaray to dinner the next day, and there were the same guests as the first time.

The dinner was cold and ceremonious. Amparito was grave, like a grown person. Scarcely speaking, she replied with discreet smiles to Alzugaray’s occasional phrases, but she was not in a humour to tease anybody.

The train started about the middle of the afternoon, and Don Calixto had arranged to have the carriage got ready, and to accompany the travellers to the station.

Cæsar was uneasy, thinking of the leave-taking. The moment for saying good-bye to Amparito and her father, it seemed to him, would be a difficult moment. Nevertheless, everything went off smoothly. The father offered his hand, without grudge. Amparito blushed a little and said:

“We shall see each other again, Moncada?”

“Yes, I’m sure of it,” replied Cæsar; and the two friends and Don Calixto took the carriage for the station.

The two friends’ return trip to Madrid was scarcely agreeable. Alzugaray was offended at Cæsar’s personal success with Amparito; Cæsar understood his comrade’s mental attitude and didn’t know what to say or do.

To them both the journey seemed long and unpleasant, and when they reached their destination, they were glad to separate.

VIII. THE ELECTION

WHAT THEY SAID IN THE TOWNS

A short while later the eventuality predicted by Cæsar occurred. The Liberal ministry met a crisis, and after various intermediate attempts at mixed cabinets, the Conservatives came into power.

Cæsar had no need to insist with the Minister of the Interior. He was one of the inevitable. He was pigeon-holed as an adherent, from the first moment.

The Government had given out the decree for the dissolution of the Cortes in February and was preparing for the General Election in the middle of April.

Cæsar would have gone immediately to Castro Duro, but he feared that if he showed interest it would complicate the situation. There were a lot of elements there, whose attitude it was not easy to foresee; Don Platón’s friends, Father Martin and his people, Amparito’s father, the friends of the opposing candidate, Garcia Padilla. Cæsar thought it better that they should consider him a young dandy with no further ambition than to give himself airs, rather than a future master of the town.

He wrote to Don Calixto, and Don Calixto told him there was no hurry, everything was in order; it would be sufficient for him to appear five or six days before the election.

Cæsar was impatient to begin his task, and it occurred to him that he might visit the towns that made up the district, without saying anything to anybody or making himself known. The excursion commenced at the beginning of the month of April. He left the train at a station before Castro. He bought a horse and went about through the towns. Nobody in the villages knew that there was going to be an election; such things made no difference to anybody.

After the inauguration of a new Government there was a little revolution in each village, produced by the change of the town-council and by the distribution of all the jobs that were municipal spoils, which passed from the hands of those calling themselves Liberals to the hands of those calling themselves Conservatives.

Cæsar discovered that besides the Liberal García Padilla, there was another candidate, protected by Father Martin La-fuerza; but it looked as if the Clericals were going to abandon him. In a town named Val de San Gil, the schoolmaster explained to him, with some fantastic details, the politics of Don Calixto. The schoolmaster was a Liberal and a frank, brusque, intelligent man, but he formed his judgment of Don Calixto’s politics on the prejudices of a Republican paper in Madrid, which was the only one he read.

According to him, Señor Moncada, whom nobody knew, was nothing more than a figure-head for the Jesuits. Father Martin Lafuerza was getting possession of too much land in Castro, and wanted everything to belong to his monastery. The Jesuits had learned of this and were sending young Moncada to undo the Franciscan friar’s combinations and establish the reign of the Loyolists.

In another place, named Villavieja, Cæsar found that the four or five persons interested in Castrian politics were against him. It seemed that the Conservative candidate they wanted was the one protected by Father Martin, who had promised them results greatly to their advantage.

In general, the people in the towns were not up on politics; when Cæsar asked them what they thought about the different questions that interest a country, they shrugged their shoulders.

In the outlying hamlets they didn’t know either who the king was or what his name was.

The only way in which the trip was of service to the future candidate was by giving him an idea of how elections were carried on, by teaching him who carried the returns to Don. Calixto, and showing him which of these people could be warranted to be honourable and which were rascals.

INDIFFERENCE IN CASTRO

Three days before the election Cæsar appeared in Castro and went to stay at Don Calixto’s house. Nobody knew about his expedition in the environs. There were no preparations whatever. People said they were going to change Deputies; but really this was of no great moment in the life of the town.

Saturday night the party committee met in the Casino at seven. Cæsar arrived a few minutes early; no one was there. He was shown into a shabby salon, lighted by an oil lamp.

It was cold in the room, and Cæsar walked about while he waited. On the ceiling a complete canopy of spider-webs, like dusty silver, trembled in every draught.

At half-past eight the first members of the committee arrived; the others kept on coming lazily in. Each one had some pretext to excuse his being late.

The fact was that the matter interested nobody; the politics of the district were going to go on as formerly, and really it wasn’t worth while thinking about. Cæsar was a decorative figure with no background.

At nine all the members of the committee were in the Casino. Don Calixto made a speech which he prolonged in an alarming manner. Cæsar answered him in another speech, which was heard with absolute coldness.

Then a frantic gabbling let loose; everybody wanted to talk. They abandoned themselves fruitfully to distinctions. “If it is certain that.... Although it is true.... Not so much because...” and they eulogized one another as orators, with great gravity.

The next day, Sunday, the proclamation of the candidates took place. They were three: Moncada, Governmental; Garcia Padilla, Liberal; and San Román, Republican.

San Román was the old Republican bookseller; it was sure beforehand that he couldn’t win, but it suited Cæsar that he should run, so that the Workmen’s Club elements should not vote for the Liberal candidate.

Two days before the election Cæsar went to Cidones and entered the Café Español.

He asked for Uncle Chinaman, and told him that he was the future Deputy. Uncle Chinaman recognized the young man with whom he had talked some months previous in his café, he remembered him with pleasure, and received him with great demonstrations.

“Man,” Cæsar said to him, “I want you to do me a favour.”

“Only tell me.”

“It is a question about the election.”

“Good. Let’s hear what it is.”

“There are several towns where Padilla’s adherents are ready, after the count, to change the real returns for forged ones. Everything is prepared for it. As I have sent people to their voting-places, they intend to make the change on the road, taking the returns from the messengers and giving them forged ones instead. I want twenty or thirty reliable men to send, four by four, to accompany the messengers that come with the returns, or else to carry them themselves.”

“All right, I will get them for you,” said Uncle Chinaman.

“How much money do you need?”

“Twenty dollars will do me.”

“Take forty.”

“All right. Which towns are they?”

Cæsar told him the names of the towns where he feared substitution. Then he warned him:

“You will say nothing about this.”

“Nothing.”

Cæsar gave precise instructions to the landlord of the café, and on bidding Uncle Chinaman good-bye, he told him:

“I know already that you are really on my side.”

“You believe so?”

“Yes.” On Sunday the elections began with absolute inanimation. In the city the Republicans were getting the majority, especially in the suburbs. Padilla was far behind. Nevertheless, it was said at the Casino that it was possible Padilla would finally win the election, because he might have an overwhelming majority in five or six rural wards.

At four in the afternoon the results in the city gave the victory to Moncada. Next to him came San Román, and in the last place Padilla.

The returns began to come in from the villages. In all of them the results were similar. It was found that the official element voted for the Government candidate, and those who had been attached to the preceding town-council for the Liberal.

At eight in the evening the returns arrived from the first village where Padilla expected a victory. The messenger, surrounded by four men from Cidones, was in a terrified condition. He handed over the returns and left. The result was the same as in all the other rural districts.

In one village alone, the presiding officer had been able to evade the vigilance of the guards sent by Cæsar and Uncle Chinaman, and change the number of votes in the returns; but despite this, the election was won for Cæsar.

The next day the exact result of the election was known. It stood:

Moncada, 3705. García Padilla, 1823. San Román, 750.

When it was known that Cæsar had played a trick on his enemies under their noses, he came into great estimation.

The judge said:

“I believe you were all deceived. You supposed Don Cæsar to be a sucking dove, and he is going to turn out to be a vulture for us.”

Cæsar listened to felicitations and accepted congratulations smiling, and some days later returned to Madrid.

IX. CÆSAR AS DEPUTY

TRIPPING THEM UP

People who didn’t know Cæsar intimately used to ask one another: “What purpose could Moncada have had in getting elected Deputy? He never speaks, he takes no part in the big debates.”

His name appeared from time to time on some committee about Treasury affairs; but that was all.

His life was completely veiled; he was not seen at first nights, or in salons, or on the promenade; he was a man apparently forgotten, lost to Madrid life. Sometimes on coming out of the Chamber he would see Amparito in an automobile; she would look for him with her eyes, and smile; he would take his hat off ostentatiously, with a low bow.

Among a very small number of persons Cæsar had the reputation of an intelligent and dangerous man. They suspected him of great personal ambition. It would not have been logical to think that this cold unexpansive man was, in his heart, a patriot who felt Spain’s decadence deeply and was seeking the means to revive her.

“No pleasures, no middle-class satisfactions,” he thought; “but to live for a patriotic ideal, to shove Spain forward, and to form with the flesh of one’s native land a great statue which should be her historic monument.”

That was his plan. In Congress Cæsar kept silence; but he talked in the corridors, and his ironic, cold, dispassionate comments began to be quoted.

He had formed relations with the Minister of the Treasury, a man who passed for famous and was a mediocrity, passed for honourable and was a rogue. Cæsar was much in his company.

The famous financier realized that Moncada knew far more than he did about monetary questions, and among his friends he admitted it; but he gave them to understand that Cæsar was only a theorist, incapable of quick decision and action.

Cæsar’s friendship was a convenience to the Minister, and the Minister’s to Cæsar. In his heart the Minister hated Cæsar, and Cæsar felt a deep contempt for the famous financier.

Nobody seeing them in a carriage talking affectionately together could have imagined that there existed such an amount of hatred and hostility between them.

The majority of people, with an absolute want of perspicacity, believed Cæsar to be fascinated by the Minister’s brilliant intellect; but there were persons that understood the situation of the pair and who used to say:

“Moncada has an influence over the Minister like that of a priest over a family.”

And there was some truth in it.

Cæsar carried his experimental method over from the stock exchange into politics. He kept a note-book, in which he put down all data about the private lives of Ministers and Deputies, and he filed these papers after classifying them.

Castro Duro began to be aware of Cæsar’s exertions. The secretary of the municipality, the employees, all who were friends and adherents to the boss’s group that Don Platón belonged with, began by degrees to leave Castro.

Those who had lost their jobs, and their protectors too, began to write letters and more letters to the Deputy. At first they believed that Cæsar wasn’t interested; but they were soon able to understand at Castro that he was interested enough, but not in them. The Minister of the Treasury served him as a battering-ram to use against the Clericals at Castro Duro.

Don Calixto was inwardly rejoiced to see his rivals reduced to impotency.

Cæsar began to establish political relations with the Republican bookseller and his friends. When he began to perceive that he was making headway with the Liberal and Labour element, he started without delay to set mines under Don Calixto’s terrain. The judge, who was a friend of Don Calixto’s, was transferred; so were some clerks of the court; and the Count of la Sauceda, the famous boss, was soon able to realize that his protégé was firing against him.

“I have nourished a serpent in my bosom,” said Don Calixto; “but I know how I can grind its head.”

He could not have been very sure of his strength; for Don Calixto found himself in a position where he had to beg for quarter. Cæsar conceded it, on the understanding that Don Calixto would not take any more part in Castro politics.

“You people had the power and you didn’t use it very well for the town. Now just leave it to me.”

In exchange for Don Calixto’s surrender, Cæsar agreed to have his Papal title legalized.

At the end of a year and a half Cæsar had all the bosses of Castro in his fist.

“Suppressing the bosses in the district was easy,” Cæsar used to say; “I managed to have one make all the others innocuous, and then I made that one, who was Don Calixto, innocuous and gave him a title.”

Cæsar did not forget or neglect the least detail. He listened to everybody that talked to him, even though they had nothing but nonsense to say; he always answered letters, and in his own handwriting.

With the townpeople he used the tactics of knowing all their names, especially the old folks’, and for this purpose he carried a little note-book. He wrote down, for example: “Señor Ramón, was in the Carlist war; Uncle Juan, suffers with rheumatism.”

When, by means of his notes, he remembered these details, it produced an extraordinary effect on people. Everybody considered himself the favourite.

CÆSAR’S MANNER OF LIVING

Cæsar lived simply; he had a room in an hotel in the Carrera de San Jerónimo, where he received calls; but nobody ever found him there except in business hours.

He used to go now and then to Alzugaray’s house, where he would talk over various matters with his friend’s mother and sister; he would find out about everything, and go away after giving them advice on questions of managing their money, which they almost always observed and followed.

Of all people, Ignacio Alzugaray was the most incredulous in regard to his friend; his mother and his sister believed in Cæsar as in an oracle. Cæsar often thought that he ought to fall definitely in love with Ignacio’s sister and marry her; but neither he nor she seemed to have set upon passing the limits of a cordial friendship.

Cæsar told the Alzugaray family how he lived and caused them to laugh and wonder.

He had rented a fairly large upper story in a street in Valle Hermoso, for five dollars. The days he had nothing to do he went there. He put on an old, worn-out fur coat, which was still a protection, a soft hat, took a stick, and went walking in the environs.

His favourite walk was the neighbourhood of the Canalillo and of the Dehesa de Amaniel.

Generally he went out of his house on the side opposite the Model Prison, then he walked toward Moncloa, and taking the right, passed near the Rubio Institute, and entered the Cerro del Pimiento by an open lot which he got into through a broken wall.

From there one could see, far away, the Guadarrama range, like a curtain of blue mountains and snowy crests; on clear days, the Escorial; Aravaca, the Casa de Campo, and the Sierra de Gredos, which ran out on the left hand like a promontory. Nearby one saw a pine grove, close to the Rubio Institute, and a valley containing market-gardens, and the ranges of the Moncloa shooting school.

Cæsar would walk on by the winding road, and stop to look at the Cemetery of San Martín on the right, with its black cypresses and its yellowish walls.

Then he would follow the twists of the Canalillo, and pass in front of the third Reservoir, to the Amaniel road.

That was where Cæsar would have built himself a house, had he had the idea of living retired.

The dry, hard landscape was the kind he liked. The mornings were wonderful, the blue sky radiant, the air limpid and thin.

The twilight had an extraordinary enchantment. All that vast extent of land, the mountains, the hills of the Casa de Campo, the cypresses of the cemetery, were bathed in a violet light.

In winter there were hunters of yellow-hammers and goldfinches in these regions, who set their nets and their decoys on the ground, and spent hours and hours watching for their game.

On Sunday, in particular, the number of hunters was very large. They went in squads of three; one carried a big bundle on his shoulder, which was the net all rolled up; another the decoy cages, fastened with a strap; and the third a frying-pan, a skin of wine, and some kindling for a fire.

Cæsar used to talk with the guards at Amaniel, with the octroi-officers, and he got to be great friends with a little hunchback, a bird hunter.

It was curious to hear this hunchback talk of the habits of the birds and of the influence of the winds. He knew how the gold-finches, yellow-hammers, and linnets make their nests, and the preference some of them have for coltsfoot cotton, and others for wool or for cow’s hair. He told Cæsar a lot of things, many of which could have existed only in his imagination, but which were entertaining.

ONE DAY AT CHRISTMASTIME

One day at Christmastime Alzugaray went in the morning to look for Cæsar. He knew where to find him and walked direct to the Calle de Galileo. At the house, they told him that Cæsar was eating in a tavern close at hand.

Alzugaray went into the place and found his friend the Deputy seated in a coner eating. He had the appearance of a superior workman, an electrician, carver, or something of the sort.

“If people find out you behave so extravagantly, they will think you are crazy,” said Alzugaray.

“Pshaw! Nobody comes here,” replied Cæsar. “The political world and this are separate worlds. This one belongs to the people who have to shoulder the load of everything, and the other is a world of villains, robbers, idiots, and fools. Really, it is difficult to find anything so vile, so inept, and so useless as a Spanish politician. The Spanish middle class is a warren of rogues and villains. I feel an enormous repugnance to brushing against it. That is why I came here now and then to talk to these people; not because these are good, no; the first and the last of them are riff-raff, but at least they say what they mean and they blaspheme naïvely.”

“What are you going to do after lunch?” Alzugaray asked him. “Have you got a sweetheart in one of the old-clothes shops of the quarter?”

“No. I was thinking of taking a walk; that’s all.”

“Then come along.”

They left the tavern and went along a street between sides of sand cut straight down, and started up the Cerro del Pimiento. The soft, vague mist allowed the Guadarrama to stand out visible.

“This landscape enchants me,” said Cæsar.

“It seems hard and gloomy,” responded Alzugaray.

“Yes, that is true; hard and gloomy, but noble. When one is drenched with a miserable political life, when one actually forms a part of that Olympus of madmen called Congress, one needs to be purified. How miserable, how vile that political life is! How many faces pale with envy there are! What low and repugnant hatreds! When I come out nauseated by seeing those people; when I am soaked with repugnance, then I come out here to walk, I look at those serious mountains, so frowning and strong, and the mere sight of them seems like a purifying flame which cleanses me from meanness.”

“I see that you are as absurd as ever, Cæsar. It would never occur to anybody to come and comfort himself with some melancholy mountains, out here between an abandoned hospital, which looks like a leper-asylum, and a deserted cemetery.”

“Well, these mountains give me an impression of energy and nobility, which raises my spirits. This leper-asylum, as you call it, sunken in a pit, this deserted cemetery, those distant mountains, are my friends; I imagine they are saying to me: ‘One must be hard, one must be strong like us, one must live in solitude....’”

They did not continue their walk much further, because the night and the fog combined made it difficult to see the path along the Canalillo, which made it possible to fall in, and that would have been disagreeable.

They returned the way they had come. From the top of a hill they saw Madrid in the twilight, covered with fog; and in the streets newly opened between the sides of sand, the lights of the gas-lamps sparkled in a nimbus of rainbow....

X. POLITICAL LABOURS

MONEY ON THE EXCHANGE

Although Cæsar did not distinguish himself especially in Congress, he worked hard. His activities were devoted mainly to two points: the stock exchange and Castro Duro.

Cæsar had found a partner to play the market for him, a Bilboan capitalist, whom he had convinced of the correctness of his system. Señor Salazar had deposited, in Cæsar’s name, thirty thousand dollars. With this sum Cæsar played for millions and he was drawing an extraordinary dividend from his stocks.

Their operations were made in the name of Alzugaray, whose job it was to go every month to see the broker, and to sign and collect the certificates. Cæsar gave his orders by telephone, and Alzugaray communicated them to the broker.

Alzugaray often went to see Cæsar and said to him:

“The broker came to my house terrified, to tell me that what we are going to do is an absurdity.”

“Let it alone,” Cæsar would say. “You know our agreement. You get ten percent of the profits for giving the orders. Do not mix in any further.”

Often, on seeing the positive result of Cæsar’s speculations, Alzugaray would ask him:

“Do you find out at the Ministry what is going to happen?”

“Pshaw!” Cæsar would say; “the market is not a capricious thing, as you think. There are signs. I pay attention to a lot of facts, which give me indications: coupons, the amount shares advance, the calculation of probabilities; and I compare all these scientific data with empirical observations that are difficult to explain. In such a situation, events are what make the least difference to me. Is there going to be a revolution or a Carlist war?... I am careless about it.”

“But this is impossible,” Alzugaray used to say. “Excuse me for saying so, but I don’t believe you. You have some secret, and that is what helps you.”

“How fantastic you all are!”’ Cæsar would exclaim; “you refuse to believe in the rational, and still you believe in the miraculous.”

“No, I do not believe in the miraculous; but I cannot explain your methods.”

“That’s clear! Am I to explain them to you! When you don’t know the mechanism of the market! I am certain that you have never considered the mechanism of the rise produced by the reintegration of the coupon, or the way that rise is limited to double its value. Tell me. Do you know what that means?”

“No.”

“Well, then, how are you to understand anything?”

“All right, then; explain it to me.”

“There’s no difficulty. You know that the natural tendency of the market is to rise.”

“To rise and to fall,” interrupted Alzugaray.

“No, only to rise.”

“I don’t see it.”

“The general tendency of the market is to rise, because having to fall eighty _céntimos_, the value of the coupon, every quarter, if the market didn’t rise to offset that loss, shares would reach zero....”

“I don’t understand,” said Alzugaray.

“Imagine a man on a stairway; if you oblige him to go down one step every so often, in order to keep in the same place as before he will necessarily have to go up again, because if he didn’t do so, he would be constantly approaching the front door.”

“Yes, surely.” “Well, this man on the stairway is the quotation, and the mechanical task of constantly making up for the quarterly loss is what is called the reintegration of the coupon.”

“You do not convince me.”

Alzugaray didn’t like listening to these explanations. He had formed an opinion that had not much foundation, but he would not admit that Cæsar, by reasoning, could arrive at the glimmering of an inductive and deductive method, where others saw no more than chance.

CÆSAR BEGINS HIS TASK

With the money he made on the market, Cæsar was making himself the master of Castro Duro. He constantly assumed a more Liberal attitude in the Chamber, and was in a position to abandon the Conservative majority, on any pretext.

His plan of campaign at Castro Duro corresponded to this political position of his: he had rehabilitated the Workmen’s Club and paid its debts. The Club had been founded by the workmen of a thread factory, now shut. The number of members was very small and the labourers and employees of the railway and some weavers were its principal support.

On learning that it was about to be closed for lack of funds, Cæsar promised to support it. He thought of endowing the Club with a library, and installing a school in the country. On seeing that the Deputy was patronizing the Club, a lot of labourers of all kinds joined it. A new governing board was named, of which Cæsar was honourary president, and the Workmen’s Club re-arose from its ashes. The Republicans and the little group of Socialists, almost all weavers, were on Cæsar’s side and promised to vote for him in the coming election.

Various Republicans who went to Madrid to call on Cæsar, told him he ought to come out as a Republican. They would vote for him with enthusiasm.

“No; why should I?” Cæsar used to answer. “Are we going to do any more at Castro by my being a Republican than when I am not one? Besides the fact that I should not be elected on that ticket and should thus have no further influence, to me the forms of a government are indifferent; I don’t even care whether it has a true ideal or a false one. What I do want is for the town to progress; whether by means of a dream or by means of a reality. A politician should seek for efficiency before asking anything else, and at present the Republican dream would not be efficient at Castro.”

Most of the Republicans did not go away very well satisfied with what Cæsar had said; and after leaving him, they would say:

“He is a very curious person, but he favours us and we’ll have to follow him.”

The reopening of the Workmen’s Club in Castro was the chance for an event. Cæsar was in favour of inaugurating the Club without any celebration, without attracting the attention of the Clericals; but the members of the Club, on the contrary, wished to give the reactionaries a dose to swallow, and Cæsar could not but promise his participation in the inauguration.

“Would you like to come to Castro?” Cæsar said to Alzugaray.

“What are you going to do there?”

“We are going to open a Club.”

“Are you going to speak?”

“Yes.”

“All right. Let’s go, so that I can hear you. Probably you will do it badly enough.”

“It’s possible.”

“And what you say won’t please anybody.”

“That’s possible, too. But that makes no difference. You will come?”

“Yes. Will there be picturesque speakers?”

“There are some, but they are not going to speak. There is one, Uncle Chinaman, who is a marvel. In describing the actual condition of Spain, he once uttered this authoritative phrase: ‘Clericalism in the zenith, immorality in high places, the debt floating more every day,...’”

“That’s very good.” “It certainly is. He made another happy phrase, criticizing the Spanish administration. ‘For what reason do they write so many useless papers?’ he said. ‘So that rats, the obscene reptiles, can go on eating them....’”

“That’s very good too.”

“He is a man without any education, but very intelligent. So you are going to come?”

“Yes.”

“Then we will meet at the station.”

CAN ONE CHANGE OR NOT?

They took the train at night and they chatted as they went along in it. Cæsar explained to Alzugaray the difficulties he had had to overcome in order that the Workmen’s Club could be reinstituted, and went on detailing his projects for the future.

“Do you believe the town is going to be transformed?” asked Alzugaray.

“Yes, certainly!” said Cæsar, staring at his friend.

“So then, you, a Darwinist who hold it as a scientific doctrine that only the slow action of environment can transform species and individuals, believe that a poor worn-out, jog-trotting race is going to revive suddenly, in a few years! Can a Darwinist believe in a revolutionizing miracle?”

“Previously, no; but now he can.”

“My dear fellow! How so?”

“Haven’t you read anything about the experiments of the Dutch botanist Hugo de Vries?”

“No.”

“Well, his experiments have proved that there are certain vegetable species which, all at once, without any preparation, without anything to make you expect it, change type absolutely and take on other characters.”

“The devil! That really is extraordinary.”

“Vries verified this rapid transformation first in a plant named OEnotheria Lamarckiana, which, all of a sudden, with no influence from the environment, with nothing to justify it, at times changes and metamorphosizes itself into a different plant.”

“But this transformation may be due to a disease,” said Alzugaray.

“No, because the mutation, after taking place, persists from generation to generation, not with pathological characteristics, but with completely normal ones.”

“It is most curious.”

“These experiments have produced Neo-Darwinism. The Neo-Darwinists, with Hugo de Vries at their head, believe that species are not generally gradually transformed, but that they produce new forms in a sudden, brusque way, having children different from the fathers. And if such brusque variations can take place in a characteristic so fixed as physiological form, what may not happen in a thing so unstable as the manner of thinking? Thus, it is very possible that the men of the Italian Renaissance or the French Revolution were mentally distinct from their predecessors and their successors, and they may even have been organically distinct.”

“But this overthrows the whole doctrine of evolution,” said Alzugaray.

“No. The only thing it has done is to distinguish two forms of change: one, the slow variation already verified by everybody, the other the brusque variation pointed out by Hugo de Vries. We see now that the impulses, which in politics are called evolution and revolution, are only reflexions of Nature’s movements.”

“So then, we may hope that Castro Duro will change into an Athens?” asked Alzugaray.

“We may hope so,” said Cæsar.

“All right, let’s hope sleeping.”

They ordered the porter to prepare two berths in the car, and they both lay down.

THE RECEPTION

In the morning Cæsar went to the dressing-room, and a short while later came back clean and dressed up as if he were at a ball.

“How spruce you are!” Alzugaray said to him.

“Yes, that’s because they will come to receive me at the station.”

“Honestly?”

“Yes.”

“Ha... ha... ha...!” laughed Alzugaray.

“What are you laughing at?” asked Cæsar, smiling.

“At your having arranged a reception and brought me along for a witness.”

“No, man, no,” said Cæsar; “I have arranged nothing. The workmen of the Club will come down out of gratitude.”

“Ah, that’s it! Then there will be only a few.”

At this juncture the car door opened and a man in the dirty clothes of a mechanic appeared.

“Don Cæsar Moncada?” he inquired.

“What is it?” said Cæsar.

“I belong to the Castro Workmen’s Club and I have come to welcome you ahead of anybody else,” and he held out his hand. “Greetings!”

“Greetings! Regards to the comrades,” said Cæsar, shaking his hand.

“Damn it, what enthusiasm!” murmured Alzugaray.

The employee disappeared. On arriving at the station, Alzugaray looked out the window and saw with astonishment that the platform was full of people.

As the car entered the covered area of the station, noisy applause broke out. Cæsar opened the door and took off his hat courteously.

“Hurrah for Moncada! Hurrah for the Deputy from Castro! Hurrah for liberty!” they heard the shouts.

Cæsar got out of the car, followed by Alzugaray, and found himself surrounded by a lot of people. There were some workmen and peasants, but the majority were comfortable citizens.

They all crowded around to grasp his hand.

Surrounded by this multitude, they left the station. There Cæsar took leave of all his acquaintances and got into a carriage with Alzugaray, while hurrahs and applauses resounded.

“Eh? What did you think of the reception?” asked Cæsar.

“Magnificent, my boy!”

“You can’t say I behaved like a demagogue.”

“On the contrary, you were too distant.”

“They know I am like that and it doesn’t astonish them.”

Cæsar had a rented house in Castro and the two friends went to it. All morning and part of the afternoon committees kept coming from the villages, who wanted to talk with Cæsar and consult him about the affairs of their respective municipalities.

INAUGURATION OF THE CLUB

In the evening the Workmen’s Club was inaugurated. Nobody in Castro talked of anything else. The Clerical element had advised all religious persons to stay away from the meeting.

The large hall of the Club was profusely lighted; and by half-past six was already completely full.

At seven the ceremony began. The president of the Club, a printer, spoke, and told of Cæsar’s benefactions; then the Republican bookseller, San Román, give a discourse; and after him Cæsar took up the tale.

He explained his position in the Chamber in detail. The people listened with some astonishment, doubtless wishing to find an opportune occasion for applause, and not finding it.

Some of the old men put their hands to their ears, like a shell, so as to hear better.

Next, Cæsar spoke about life in Castro, and pointed out the town’s needs.

“You have here,” he said, “three fundamental problems, as is the case with almost all towns in the interior of Spain. First: water. You have neither good drinking water, nor enough water for irrigation. For want of drinkable water, the mortality of Castro is high; for want of irrigation, you cannot cultivate more than a very small zone, under good conditions. For that reason water must be brought here, and an irrigation canal begun. Second problem: subsistence. Here, as in the whole of Castile, there are people who corner the grain market and raise the price of wheat, and people who corner the necessities of life and put up their prices as high as they feel like. To prevent this, it is necessary for the Municipality to establish a public granary which shall regulate prices. For, want of that, the people are condemned to hunger, and people that do not eat can neither work nor be free. Third problem: means of transport. You have the railway here, but you have neither good highways nor good byways, and transportation is most difficult. I, for my part, will do all I can to keep the federal government from neglecting this region, but we must also stir up the little municipalities to take care of their roads.

“These three are questions that must be settled as soon as possible.

“Water, subsistence, transportation; those are not matters of luxury, but of necessity, matters of life. They belong to what may be called the politics of bread.

“I cannot make the reforms alone; first, because I have not the means; next, because even supposing I had, if I must leave these improvements in a township that would not look after them, not take care of them, they would soon disappear; they would be like the canals dug by the Moors and afterwards allowed to fill up through the neglect of the Christians. That is what politics are needed for, to convince reactionaries.

“At the same time, looking toward the future, let us start the school, which I should like to see not merely a primary school, but also a school for working-men.

“Let us endeavour, too, to turn the field of San Roque into a park.”

After explaining his program, Cæsar called on all progressive men who had liberal ideas and loved their city, to collaborate in his work.

When he ended his speech, all the audience applauded violently. Alzugaray was able to verify the fact that the majority of them had not understood what Cæsar was saying. “They didn’t understand anything. A few sparkling phrases would have pleased them much better.”

“Ah, of course. But that makes no difference,” replied Cæsar. “They will get used to it.”

The inauguration over, the bookseller, San Román, Dr. Ortigosa, Señor Camacho, who was the pharmacist that called himself an inventor of explosives, and some others, met in the office of the Club, and talked with great enthusiasm of the transformation that was obviously taking place at Castro.

XI. THE PITFALL OF SINIGAGLIA

A COMMISSION FOR THE MINISTER

A few days later, during Carnival, the Minister of the Treasury presented himself at Cæsar’s hotel. The famous financier was a trifle nervous.

“Come along with me,” he said.

“Come on.”

They got into a motor, and the Minister suddenly asked:

“Could you go to Paris immediately?”

“There’s nothing to prevent. What is it to do?”

“You know that the great financier Dupont de Sarthe is studying out a plan for restoring the value of the currency of Spain.”

“Yes.”

“Well, today the Speaker asked me several times if it was ready. It is necessary for me to introduce it soon, as soon as possible, and along with the plan for restoring the currency, one for the suppression of the government tax.”

“The Speaker wishes to have these plans introduced?”

“Yes, he wishes them introduced at once.”

“That indicates that the Conservative situation is very strong,” said Cæsar.

“Obviously.”

“And what do you want me to do?”

“Go to Dupont de Sarthe and have him explain his scheme clearly, and tell you the difficulties; if he has an outline of it, have him give it to you; if not, have him give you his notes.”

“All right. Shall I go tonight?”

“If you can, it would be the best thing.” “There’s nothing to prevent. Take me back to the hotel and I will pack.”

The Minister told the chauffeur to go back to Cæsar’s house.

“As soon as you arrive, let me know by wire, and write to me explaining the scheme in the greatest possible detail.”

“Very good.”

“You will need money; I don’t know if I have any here,” said the Minister, feeling for his pocket-book.

“I have enough for the trip,” replied Cæsar. “But, as I might need some in Paris, it would not be a bad idea for you to open an account for me at a bank there, or else to give me a cheque.”

The Minister vacillated, then went into the hotel writing-room and signed a cheque on a Parisian banker in the Rue de Provence, which he handed to Cæsar.

“See you on your return,” he said.

“Good-bye.”

Cæsar called a servant and bade him:

“Telephone to my friend Alzugaray. You know his number. Tell him to be here inside an hour.”

“Very good, sir.”

This arranged, Cæsar went to the main door and saw that the Minister’s motor was headed for down town. Immediately he took a carriage and went to the Chamber. The undersecretary of the Speaker was a friend of his; sometimes he gave him advice about playing the market.

Cæsar looked him up, and when he found him, said:

“How are we getting on?”

“All right, man,” replied the undersecretary.

“Come over here, so I can see you in the light,” said Cæsar, and taking him by the hand, he looked into his eyes.

“It’s true,” said the undersecretary, laughing, “that the situation is not very strong.”

“What is the danger?”

“The only danger is your friend, the famous financier. He is the one who could play us a dirty trick.”

“Do you suspect what it could be?” “No. Not clearly. You must know better than any one else.”

“I have just seen the Minister, and he gave me the impression of being satisfied.”

“Then everything is all right. But I haven’t much confidence.”

Cæsar left the undersecretary, went out of the Chamber, and returned home in the carriage. Alzugaray was waiting in the entry for him.

Cæsar called to him from the carriage:

“I am going to Paris,” he told him, “to spend a few days.”

“Good.”

“I must draw out what money I have in the Bank.”

“Let’s go there now.”

They went to the Bank, to the paying teller, and Cæsar drew out twenty thousand pesetas of his few months’ winnings on the market.

“You are not going to play at all, this month?” asked Alzugaray.

“No, not this month.”

They left the Bank.

“I will wire you my address in Paris,” said Cæsar.

“Very good. And nothing is to be done?”

“No. That is to say, my partner and I are not going to play. Nevertheless, I am going to leave you two thousand pesetas, and if you think well, you can use it as you choose.”

“All right,” said Alzugaray, pleased at Cæsar’s confidence in his talents for speculation.

“In case I need any information which had best not be public,” Cæsar went on, “I will wire you in code. Do you know the Aran code?”

“No.”

“I will give it to you, directly, at my house. If you receive a telegram from me from Paris, beginning with your name: ‘Ignacio, do thus or so,’ you will know it is in the code.”

“I follow you. What’s up?”

“An affair the Minister is putting through, which we will not let him pull off without getting our share out of him. I will explain it to you, when I come back.”

“How long do you expect to be there?”

“Two weeks at most; but perhaps I’ll come right back.”

INDUCTION

On arriving at the train, Cæsar bought all the evening papers. In one of them he found an article entitled: _The Projects of the Minister of Finance_, and he read it carefully.

The writer said that the Minister of Finance had never been so closely identified with the Conservative Cabinet as at that moment; that he had plans for a number of projects for the salvation of the Spanish Treasury, which he would briefly explain.

“It’s a witty joke,” thought Cæsar.

He was too well acquainted with the market and monetary affairs in general, too well acquainted with the sterling worth of the famous financier not to understand the idea of his scheme.

Cæsar knew that the Minister not only was not on good terms with his colleagues in the Government, but was at sword’s points with them, and was moreover disposed to give up his portfolio from one day to the next.

Whence came this haste to launch the plan for the suppression of the government tax and restoring the value of the currency? Why did he send him, Cæsar, on this errand, and not somebody in the Department?

His haste to launch the plan was easy to comprehend.

The Minister was about to give a decisive impulse to all stocks; the suppression of the affidavit and the restoring the value of the currency would shove up domestic paper in Spain and foreign stocks in France to extraordinary heights. Then a difficulty with the Speaker, a moment of anger, such as was to be expected in a character like the Minister’s, would oblige him to offer his resignation... prices would take a terrible drop, and the Minister, having already planned for a big bear scoop in Paris, would clear some hundreds of thousands of francs and keep his reputation as a patriot and an excellent financier.

Why was he sending Cæsar? No doubt because he suspected his secretary, whom he had probably given similar missions to previously.

Cæsar knew the Minister well. He had described him in his notes in these words: “He is dark and brachicephalic; a man of tradition and good common sense; average intellect, astute, a good father and a good Catholic. He believes himself cleverer than he really is. His two leading passions are vanity and money.”

Cæsar knew the Minister, but the Minister did not know Cæsar. He imagined him to be a man of brilliant intellect, but incapable of grasping realities.

After thinking a long while over the business, while he was undressing to go to bed in the sleeping-car, Cæsar said:

“There is only one thing to find out. Who is the Minister’s broker in Paris, and who is his banker? With Yarza’s assistance that is not going to be difficult for me to ascertain. When we know what broker he works through and what banker, the affair is finished.”

Having concluded thus, he got into his berth, put out the light, and lay there dozing.

IN PARIS

On arriving at Paris next evening, he left his luggage in the hotel at the Quai d’Orsay station. He wired his address to the Minister and to Alzugaray, and went out at once to look for Carlos Yarza. He was unable to find him until very late at night. He explained to his friend what had brought him, and Yarza told him he was at his disposition.

“When you need me, let me know.”

“Good.”

Cæsar went off to bed, and the next morning he proceeded to the banking-house in the Rue de Provence where he was to cash the cheque handed him by the Minister of the Treasury.

He entered the bank and asked for the president. A clerk came out and Cæsar explained to him that on arriving at his hotel he had missed a cheque for three thousand francs from the Spanish Minister of Finance. He introduced himself as a Deputy, as an intimate friend of the Minister’s, and behaved as if much vexed. The department manager told him that they could do no more than take the number and not pay the cheque if anybody presented it for payment.

“You don’t handle the Minister’s business here?” asked Cæsar.

“No, only very rarely,” said the manager.

“You don’t know who his regular banker is?”

“No; I will ask, because it is very possible that the chief may know.”

The clerk went out and came back a little later, informing Cæsar that they said the house the Spanish Minister of Finance did his banking with was Recquillart and Company, Rue Bergère.

The street was near at hand, and it took Cæsar only a very little while to get there. The building was dark, lighted by electricity even in the daytime, one of those classic corners where Jewish usurers amass great fortunes.

There was no question of employing the same ruse as in the Rue de Provence, and Cæsar thought of another.

He asked for M. Recquillart, and out came a heavy gentleman, a blond going grey, with a rosy cranium and gold eyeglasses.

Cæsar told him he was secretary to a rich Spanish miner, who was then in Paris. That gentleman wanted to try some business on the Bourse, but was unable to come to the bank because he was ill of the dropsy.

“Who recommended our house to this gentleman?” asked the banker.

“I think it was the Minister of Finance, in Spain.”

“Ah, yes, very good, very good! And how are we to communicate with him? Through you?”

“No. He told me he would prefer to have a clerk who knows Spanish come to him and take his orders.” “That is all right; one shall go. We happen to have a Spanish clerk. At what hour shall he come?” said M. Recquillart, taking out a pencil.

“At nine in the evening.”

“For whom shall he ask?”

“For Señor Pérez Cuesta.”

“At what hotel?”

“The one in the Quai d’Orsay station.”

“Very good indeed.”

Cæsar bowed; and after he had sent Yarza a telephone message, making an appointment for after the Bourse at the Café Riche, he took an automobile and went to hunt for the great financier Dupont de Sarthe, who lived on the other bank of the Seine, near the Montparnasse station.

He had a large, sumptuous office, with an enormous library. Two secretaries were at work at small tables placed in front of the balconies, and the master wrote at a big Ministerial table full of books. When Cæsar introduced himself, the great economist rose, offered his hand, and in a sharp voice with a Parisian accent, asked what he desired.

Cæsar told him the Minister’s request, and the great economist became indignant.

“Does that gentleman imagine that I am at his bidding, to begin a piece of work and stop it according as it suits him, and take it up again when he orders? No, tell him no. Tell him the scheme he asked me for is not done, not finished; that I cannot give him any data or any information at all.”

In view of the great man’s indignation, Cæsar made no reply, but left the house. He lunched at his hotel, gave orders that if any one brought a letter or message for Señor Pérez Cuesta they should receive it, and went again to the Rue de Provence, where he said he had had the good luck to find his cheque.

With all these goings and comings it got to be three o’clock, and Cæsar turned his steps toward the Café Riche. Yarza was there and the two talked a long while. Yarza knew of the manoeuvres of the Minister of Finance, and he gave his opinion about them with great knowledge of the business questions. He also knew Recquillart’s clerk, the Catalan Pujol, of whom he had not a very good opinion.

The two friends made an engagement for the next day and Cæsar hurried to his hotel. He wrote to the Minister, telling him what the fundamentals of Dupont de Sarthe’s project were; and between his own ideas and those Yarza had expounded to him, he was able to draw up a complete enough plan.

“The Minister being a man who knows nothing about all this,” thought Cæsar, “when he understands that the ideas I expound are those of the celebrated Dupont de Sarthe, will find them wonderful.”

RECQUILLART’S CLERK

After having written his letter and taken a little tea, he lay stretched out on a divan, until they brought him word that a young man was asking for Señor Pérez Cuesta.

“Send him up.”

Señor Puchol entered, a dark little man who wore a morning-coat and had a hat with a flat brim edged with braid.

Cæsar greeted him affably and made him sit down.

“But are you not Spanish?” Cæsar asked him.

“Yes, I was born in Barcelona.”

“I should have taken you for a Frenchman.”

“In dress and everything else, I am a complete Parisian.”

“This poor man is full of vanity,” thought Cæsar. “All the better.” He immediately began to explain the affair.

“Look,” he said, “the whole matter is this: the Spanish Minister of Finance, my chief, has dealings on a large scale with the Recquillart bank; you know that, and so do I; but the Recquillarts, besides charging an inflated commission, interfere in his buying and selling with so little cleverness, that whenever he buys, it turns out that he bought for more than the market price of the security, and whenever he sells, he sells lower than the quotation. The Minister does not wish to break off with the Recquillarts....”

“He can’t, you meant to say,” replied Puchol, in an insinuating manner. “Since you know the situation...” responded Cæsar.

“Oughtn’t I to?”

“Since you know the whole situation,” continued Cæsar, “I will say that he cannot indeed break off with the Recquillarts, but the Minister would like to do business with somebody else, without passing under the yoke of the chief.”

“He ought to make arrangements with another broker here,” said Puchol.

“Ah, certainly. I have brought some twenty thousand francs with that object.”

“Then there is no difficulty.”

“But we need a go-between. The Minister doesn’t care to turn to the first banker at hand and explain all his combinations to him.”

“That’s where I come in.”

“Good, but we must know beforehand how much you are to get. Your demands may be such that it would be better for him to stick to the Recquillarts.”

“Recquillart gets ten percent of the profits, besides a small commission as broker. I will take five.”

“It’s a good deal.”

“I will not accept less; the arrangement might cost me my career. Consult him....”

“If I could consult him! The truth is that there may not be time. We will accept five.”

“What does the Minister wish to speculate in? The same things as with Recquillart? Foreign Loans and Northerns?”

“Exactly. Just as before.”

“All right. The investment, as you can see, is safe,” Puchol continued. “I would put my fortune in it, if I had one. There are a lot of newspapers bought; all the financial reviews are predicting a rise.”

The clerk took out a folded review and handed it to Cæsar, who read:

“We are assured that the plan of the Spanish Minister of Finance must make foreign securities rise considerably. Northerns will follow the same path, and there are indications that their rise will be very rapid and will cover several points.”

“The field is going to be covered with corpses,” said Cæsar.

Señor Puchol burst out laughing; Cæsar invited him to dine with him, and gave him a sumptuous dinner with good wines.

Puchol was absolutely vain, and he boasted of his triumphs on the Bourse; it was he who guided Recquillart in the dealings he had with Spaniards, in which they had plucked various incautious persons.

“How much will the Minister’s operation amount to?” Cæsar asked him.

“Nobody can prevent his making three hundred thousand, at the least. With the increase he has ordered you to make, it will come to six hundred thousand. We will gobble up the two points it falls.”

“I don’t know if there may have been some new order while I was in the train coming to Paris,” said Cæsar.

“No, his operation is all arranged,” replied Puchol, and he got out a note-book and consulted it. “It will be like giving away bread. We are going to sell ten millions of Foreigns and five hundred Northerns on the seventeenth, the eighteenth, and the twentieth.”

“And the scoop will take place?” asked Cæsar.

“On the 27th.”

“So that on those days we shall sell just as much again?”

“And we shall sell much dearer.”

They dropped that point and talked of other things.

Señor Puchol was a literary man and was writing a symbolistic drama which he wanted to read to Cæsar.

At twelve they said good-night. Puchol was to tell his chief that he had not been able to do any business with Señor Pérez Cuesta. In respect to the other matter, they had an engagement for ten the next morning at a café in the neighbourhood of the Bourse.

There were no great difficulties to overcome. They saw a broker named Müller. Cæsar entrusted him with his twenty thousand francs, and hinted that the speculation was being made for some rich people, who would have no objection to making up any loss, if he should exceed the twenty thousand francs.

The broker told him he could play whatsoever sum he wished.

As Cæsar had not entire confidence in Puchol, and did not care either to tell the broker that he was to begin only when the stocks fell, he brought Yarza into the deal.

Puchol was to say to Yarza: “The Minister has given the order to sell”; and Yarza would first verify this, if he could verify it; then he would tell the broker: “Sell.” It might go as far as handling twenty millions of Foreigns and up to a thousand of Northerns.

In order to get all the ends well tied up, Cæsar had to get from one place to another without a moment’s rest.

IN MADRID

The trap being set, Cæsar took the train, worn out and feverish. He arrived at Madrid, took a bath, and went to see the Minister; and after the interview went to his house in the Calle de Galileo and spent two days in bed, alone in the completest silence.

The third day Alzugaray arrived, anxious.

“What’s the matter? Are you sick?” he asked.

“No. How did you know I was here?”

“Your janitress came to my house to tell me you were in bed.”

“Well, there’s nothing wrong with me, boy.”

“You should know that there’s a splendid chance to make some money, today.”

“My dear fellow!”

“Yes, and we haven’t done anything in the market, except one miserable little operation.”

“And why do you think there is such a good chance?”

“Because there is, because everybody can see it,” said Alzugaray. “Prices are going to rise with this project of the Minister of Finance’s; they are going in for a big deal; everybody has been indiscreet, without meaning to be, and people on the market are buying and buying. Everybody is sure of a rise... and we are doing nothing.”

“We are doing nothing,” repeated Cæsar.

“But it is absurd.”

“What’s the date?”

“The twenty-second.”

“The evening of the twenty-seventh we will talk.”

“How mysterious you are, boy.”

“I can’t tell you any more now. If you have bought anything, sell it.”

“But why?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“All right, when you get on these sibylline airs, I say no more. Another thing. Various gentlemen have come to tell me that they wanted to play the market; they have heard that it is about to go up....”

“Who were they?”

“Among others, Amparito’s father and Don Calixto García Guerrero.”

“If they wish to give security, tell our broker, and I will sell them anything they want to buy.”

“Really?”

“Really. I have my reasons for doing it.”

“This time we are all going to make, except you.”

“Dear Ignacio, I am at Sinigaglia.”

“What does that mean?”

“If you have a moment free, read the history of the Borgias,” murmured Cæsar, turning over in bed.

The next few days Cæsar lived in constant intranquillity. Yarza telegraphed him, saying that they had done the whole operation. On the 27th, in the afternoon, Cæsar wandered toward the Calle de Alcalá; Madrid wore its normal aspect; the newspaper boys were calling no extras. More worried than he liked, Cæsar went for his walk by the Canalillo and then shut himself in his house. In the evening he went out breathless and bought the newspapers. His first impression was one of panic; there was nothing; on reaching the third page he uttered an exclamation and smiled. The Minister of Finance had just offered his resignation.

The next morning Cæsar went to the hotel in the Carrera de San Jerónimo where he had a room, and in the afternoon to the Chamber. He telephoned to Alzugaray to come and see him after the exchange closed.

Alzugaray arrived, looking pale, in company with Amparito’s father, Don Calixto, and the broker. They were all wretched. The news was horrible. Domestics had fallen two points and were still falling; in Paris the Foreign Loan had fallen more than four; Northern was not falling but tumbling to the bottom of a precipice.

“Did you know that the Minister was going to present his resignation?” asked the broker, in despair.

“I, no. How should I know it? Even the Minister himself couldn’t have known it yesterday. But I had scientific data for not believing in that rise.”

“I am ruined,” exclaimed the broker. “I have lost my savings.”

Don Calixto and Amparito’s father had also lost very large sums, which Cæsar won, and they were disconsolate.

When they were gone and only Alzugaray remained, he said to Cæsar:

“And you have played in Paris, too, probably.”

“Yes.”

“On a fall?”

“Certainly.”

“You are a bandit.”

“This game, my dear Ignacio, based solely on events, is not a speculator’s game, but is, simply, a hold-up. The other day I told you: ‘I am at Sinigaglia.’ Did you read the history of Cæsar Borgia?”

“Yes.”

“Well, what he did at Sinigaglia to the _condottieri_, to Vittellozzo, Oliverotto da Fermo, and his other two captain-adventurers, I have done to the Minister of Finance, to Don Calixto, Amparito’s father, and many others.” And Cæsar explained his game. Alzugaray was amazed.

“How much have you made?”

“From what these telegrams say, I think I shall go over half a million francs. From those beginners, Don Calixto and Amparito’s father, I think I have made forty thousand pesetas.”

“What an atrocious person! If the Minister should find out about your game.”

“Let him find out. I am not worried. The famous financier, in addition to being an idiot, is an honourable rogue. He plays the market with the object of enriching himself and leaving a fortune to his repugnant children. I, on the other hand, play it with a patriotic object.”

The matter didn’t rest there: Puchol, carried away by an easily comprehensible desire for lucre, and thinking it brought the same amount to the famous financier whether he played through Recquillart or through Muller, had made the last bid for the Minister through the new broker.

The Minister’s winnings diminished considerably and Cæsar’s gained in proportion. The illustrious financier, on learning what had happened, shrieked to heaven; but he said nothing, because of the secret transaction they had had together. Puchol was dismissed by Recquillart, and with the thirty thousand francs he collected from Cæsar he set up for himself.

The Minister, a little later, went to Biarritz, to collect his share. On his return he sent Cæsar a note, unsigned and written on the type-writer. It read:

“I did not think you had enough ability for cheating. Another time I will be more careful.”

Cæsar replied in the same manner, as follows:

“When it’s a question of a man who, besides being an idiot, is a poor creature and a cheat like you, I have no scruple in robbing him first and despising him afterwards.”

Some days later Cæsar published an article attacking the retiring Minister of Finance and disclosing a lot of data and figures.

The Minister answered with a letter in a Conservative paper, in which he denied everything Cæsar alleged, and said, with contempt, that questions of Finance were not to be treated by “amateurs.”

Cæsar said that he considered himself insulted by the Minister’s words, whom, however, he admired as a financier; and a few months later he joined the Liberal party and was received with open arms by its famous chief.

XII. LOCAL STRUGGLES

THE WATER SUPPLY

Cæsar had money in abundance, and he decided to exert a decisive influence on Castro Duro.

For a long while he had had various projects planned.

He thought it was an appropriate moment to put them into practice.

The first that he tried to carry out was the water supply.

The Municipality had a plan for this in the archives, and Cæsar asked for it to study. The scheme was big and expensive; the stream it was necessary to harness so as to bring it to Castro, was far away. Besides it was requisite to construct a piping system or an aqueduct.

Cæsar consulted an engineer, who told him:

“From a business point of view, this is very poor. Even if you use the superfluous water, in a factory for instance, it will give you no results.”

“What shall we do then?”

“The simplest thing would be to put in a pumping plant and pump up the river water.”

“But it is infected water, full of impurities.”

“It can be purified by filtering. That’s not difficult.”

Cæsar laid this plan before the Municipality, and it was decided to carry it out, as the most practical and practicable. A company was formed to pump up the water, and work was begun.

The stockholders were almost all rich people of Castro, and the company drew up its constitution in such a manner that the town got scarcely any benefit out of it. They were not going to instal more than two public fountains inside the city limits, and those were to run only a few hours. Cæsar tried to convince them that this was absurd, but nobody paid any attention to him.

THE LIBRARY

A bit disappointed, he left the “Water Pumping Company” to go its way, and devoted himself entirely to things that he could carry out alone.

The first one he tried was establishing a circulating library of technical books on trades and agriculture, and of polite and scientific literature, in the Workmen’s Club.

“They will sell the books,” everybody said; “they will get them all soiled, and tear out the leaves....”

Cæsar had the volumes bound, and at the end of each he had ten or twelve blank sheets put in, in case the reader wished to write notes.

The experiment began; predictions were not fulfilled; the books came back to the library untorn and unspotted and with some very ingenuous notes in them. Lots of people took out books.

The clerical element immediately protested; the priests said in the pulpit that to send any chance book to working people’s houses without examining it first, was to lead people into error. Dr. Ortigosa retorted that Science did not need the approval of sacristans. As, in spite of the clerical element’s advice, people kept on reading, there were various persons that took out books and filled them with obscene drawings and tore out illustrations. Dr. Ortigosa sent Cæsar a letter informing him what was happening, and Cæsar answered that he must limit the distribution of books to the members of the Workmen’s Club and people that were known. He bade him replace the six or seven books abused, and continued to send new ones.

The ferment kept the city stirred up; there were no end of heated discussions; lectures were given in the Club, and Dr. Ortigosa’s paper, _The Protest_, came to life again.

“I am with you in whatever will agitate the people’s ideas,” wrote Cæsar; “but if they start to play orators and revolutionists, and you folks come along with pedantic notions, then I for my part shall drop the whole thing.”

When Cæsar was in Castro, he spent his evenings at the Workmen’s Club. They gave moving pictures and frequent balls. Cæsar did not miss one of the Club’s entertainments. The men came to him for advice, and the girls and the little boys bowed to him affectionately. There was great enthusiasm over him.

THE BENEVOLENT SOCIETY

Shortly after the initiation of these improvements in the Club, there appeared in Castro Duro, without fuss, without noise, two rather mysterious societies; the Benevolent Society of Saint Joseph and the Agricultural Fund. In an instant the Benevolent Society of Saint Joseph had a numerous array of members and patrons. All the great landholders of the region, including Amparito’s father, bound themselves to employ no labourers except those belonging to the Benevolent Society. In the neighbouring villages the inhabitants joined _en masse_. At the same time as this important society, Father Martin and his friends founded the Castrian Agricultural Fund, whose purpose was to make loans, at a low rate of interest, to small proprietors.

The two Catholic institutions set themselves up in rivalry to the Workmen’s institution. The town was divided; the Catholics were more numerous and richer; the Liberals more determined and enthusiastic. The Catholics had given their upholders a resigned character.

Moreover, the name Catholic applied to the members of the two Clerical societies made those who did not belong to them admit with great tranquillity that _they_ were not Catholics.

The Clericals called their enemies Moncadists, and by implication Schismatics, Atheists, and Anarchists. Inside the town there was a Moncadist majority; in the environs everybody was a Catholic and belonged to the Benevolent Society.

Generally the Catholics were abused in word and deed by the Moncadists; the members of the Workmen’s Club held those of the Benevolent Society for cowards and traitors. Doubtless Father Martín did not wish that his followers should be distinguished by Christian meekness, and he appointed a bully whom people called “Driveller” Juan warden of the Benevolent Society. This Juan was a lad who lived without working; his mother and his sisters were dressmakers, and he bled them for money, and spent his life in taverns and gambling-dens.

“Driveller” began to insult members of the club, especially the boys, and to defy them, on any pretext. Dr. Ortigosa went to see Cæsar and explained the situation. “Driveller” was a coward, he didn’t venture beyond a few peaceable workmen; but if he had defied “Furibis” or “Panza” or any of the railway men that belonged to the Club, they would have given him what he deserved. But in spite of “Driveller’s” cowardice, he inspired terror among the young boys and apprentices.

Dr. Ortigosa was in favour of getting another bully, who could undertake the job of cutting out “Driveller’s” guts.

“Whom are we to get?” asked Cæsar.

“We know somebody,” said Ortigosa.

“Who is it?”

“’ El Montes.’”

“What kind of a party is he?”

“A bandit like the other, but braver.”

_BANDITS_

“El Montes” had just come out of Ocaña.

He was a Manchegan, tall, strong, robust, and had been in the penitentiary several times.

“And how do we manage ‘El Montes’?” asked Cæsar.

“We make him a servant at the Workmen’s Club.”

“He will corrupt the place.”

“Yes, that’s true. Then at the right moment we shall send him to the Café del Comercio. They gamble at that café; he can go there and in two or three days call a halt on ‘Driveller’ Juan.” “Good.”

“We must arrange for you to dismiss the new judge and put in some friend of yours, and one fine day we will get a quarrel started and we will put all Father Martin’s friends in jail.”

“You two play atrocious politics,” said Alzugaray, who was listening to the conversation.

“It’s the only kind that will work,” replied Ortigosa. “This is scientific politics. Ruffianism converted into philosophy. We are playing a game of chess with Father Martin and we are going to see if we can’t win it.”

“But, man, employing all these cut-throats!”

“My dear friend,” responded Cæsar, “political situations include such things; with their heads they touch the noblest things, the safety of one’s native land and the race; with their feet they touch the meanest things, plots, vices, crimes. A politician of today still has to mingle with reptiles, even though he be an honourable man.”

“Besides, we need have no scruples,” added Ortigosa; “the inhabitants of Castro are laboratory guinea-pigs. We are going to experiment on them, we are going to see if they can stand the Liberal serum.”

* * * * *

_THE TWO ASYLUMS_

A little after these rivalries between the Benevolent Society and the Workmen’s Club, which stirred up every one’s passions to an extreme never before known at Castro Duro, another motive for agitation transpired.

There were two asylums in the town; the Municipal Aid and the Asylum of the Little Sisters of the Poor.

The Municipal Aid had its own property and was wisely organized; the old people were permitted to go out of the asylum, they had no uniform, and from time to time they were allowed to drink a glass of something. In the Little Sisters’ Home, on the contrary, discipline was most severe; all the inmates had to go dressed in a horrible uniform, which the poor hated; to be present, like a chorus, at the funerals of important persons; pray at every step; and besides all that, they were forbidden under pain of expulsion, to smoke or to drink anything.

So the result was that there were abandoned old wretches, who, if they couldn’t get a place in the Aid, let themselves die in some corner, rather than put on the uniform of the Little Sisters’ Home, degrading in their eyes.

That asylum had no income, because its Catholic managers had eaten it all up. In view of the institution’s bad economic condition, it occurred to Father Martin to consolidate the two; to make one asylum of the municipal and the religious, and to put it under the strict rule of the religious one. What Father Martin wanted was that the Little Sisters should have a finger in the whole thing, and that the income of one institution should serve for both.

Cæsar threatened the mayor with dismissal if he accepted the arrangement, and insisted that the Liberal councilmen should not permit the fusion, which was to the great advantage of the Clerical party.

As a matter of fact, the plan came to nothing, and Cæsar treated the Municipal Aid to two barrels of wine and tobacco in abundance, which aroused great enthusiasm among the old people, who cheered for the Deputy of their District.

Cæsar rode over the situation on horseback; but the Clerical campaign strengthened at the same rate that popular sympathies went out toward him. In almost every sermon there were allusions to the immorality and the irreligion that reigned in the town. The support of the women was sought and they were exhorted to influence their husbands, brothers, and sons to resign from the Workmen’s Club.

The old pulpit oratory began to seem mild, and on the feast of the Virgin of the Rock, a young preacher launched out, in the church, into an eloquent, violent, and despotic sermon in which he threatened eternal suffering to those who belonged to heretical clubs and would not return to the loving bosom of the Church. The homily caused the greatest impression, and there were a few unhappy mortals who, some days later, were reported as dead or missing at the Workmen’s Club.

XIII. AMPARITO IN ACTION

_LAURA AT CASTRO_

A time for new elections arrived, and Cæsar stood for Castro Duro. Don Calixto, who had married his two daughters and was bored at not being allowed to pull the strings in the town, decided to move to Madrid. First he had thought of spending only some time at the capital, but later he decided to stay there and he had his furniture sent down.

People said that Don Calixto had no great affection for the old palace of the Dukes of Castro, and Cæsar proposed that he should rent the house to him.

Don Calixto hesitated; in Castro he would certainly have refused, but being in Madrid he accepted. His wife advised him that if he had any scruples, he should ask more rent. They came to the agreement that Cæsar should pay three thousand pesetas a year for the part Don Calixto had formerly inhabited.

This time Cæsar had the election won, and there was not the slightest fight. He was the boss of Castro, a good boss, accepted by everybody, save the Clericals.

Cæsar had money, and he wrote to his sister to come and see him at Castro in his seigniorial mansion. Laura arrived at Madrid in the autumn, and the two went to Castro together.

Laura’s appearance in the town created a great sensation. At first people said she was Cæsar’s wife. Others said she was an actress; until finally everybody understood that she was his sister.

Laura really took undue advantage of her superiority. She was irresistibly amiable and bewitching with everybody. The majority of the men in Castro Duro talked of nothing but her, and the women hated her to the death.

Being a marchioness, a Cardinal’s niece, and a Deputy’s sister, gave her, besides, a terrible social prestige.

One person who clung to her, enchanted to have such a friend, was Amparito. She went to the palace in her motor at all hours, to see Laura and chat with her. In the afternoon the two of them used to walk in Amparito’s father’s property, where the labourers, who were threshing, received them like queens.

What enchanted Laura was the wild garden at Don Calixto’s house, with its pomegranates and laurels, its tower above the river, full of climbing plants and oleanders.

“You ought to buy this house,” she used to tell Cæsar.

“It would cost a good deal.”

“Pshaw! You could arrange that wonderfully. You would get married and live here like a prince.”

“Get married?”

“Yes. To Amparito. That young thing is enchanting.

“She will make a splendid little wife. Even for your respectability as a Deputy, it would be fitting to marry. A bachelor politician has a poor look.”

Cæsar paid no attention to these suggestions and continued to lead an unsocial life. He covered the environs on horseback, found out everything that was going on and settled it. In this he set himself an enormous task, which was not notable for results; but he hoped to succeed in conquering the district completely, and then to extend his sphere of action to others and yet others.

After being a fortnight in Castro Duro, Laura went to Biarritz, as was her custom every year.

AMPARITO AND CÆSAR

Cæsar was left alone. He had seen Amparito with his sister many times but had scarcely ever exchanged more than a few words with her. One afternoon Cæsar was in the gallery in an arm-chair, with his feet high. He felt melancholy and lazy, and was watching the clouds move across the sky. Soon he heard steps, and saw Amparito with an old servant who had been her nurse.

Cæsar jumped up.

“What’s the matter?” he exclaimed.

“I came to get something Laura forgot,” said Amparito.

“She forgot something?” asked Cæsar stupidly.

“Yes,” replied Amparito; and added, addressing the old woman:

“Go see if there is a little glass box in Señorita Laura’s room.”

The old woman went out, and Amparito, looking at Cæsar, who was on his feet watching her nervously, said:

“Do you still hate me?”

“I?” exclaimed Cæsar.

“Yes, you do hate me.”

“I! I have never hated you.... Quite the contrary.”

“Whenever you see me you get away, and just now you looked at me as if you were terrified. Have you such a grudge against me for a joke I played on you long ago?”

“I, a grudge! No. It is because I have the impression, Amparito, that you want to upset my plans, to make game of me. Why do you?”

“Do you think I try to amuse myself by worrying you?”

“Yes.”

“No, that isn’t true. You don’t think so.”

“Then why this constant inclination to distress me, to poke fun at me?”

“I never poked fun at you.”

“Then I have made a mistake.... I had come to think that you took some interest in me.”

“And so I did. I did take an interest in you, and I keep on taking an interest in you.”

“And why so?”

“Because I see that you are unhappy, and you are alone.”

“Ah! You are sorry for me!” “Now you are offended. Yes, I am sorry for you.”

“Sorry!”

“Yes, sorry. Because I see that you despise everybody and despise yourself, because you think people are bad, and that you are too, and to me this seems so sad that it makes me pity you deeply.”

Cæsar began to walk up and down the gallery, trembling a little.

“I don’t see why you say this to me,” he murmured. “I am a morbid man, with an ulcerated, wounded spirit.... I know that. But why say it to me? Do you take pleasure in humiliating me?”

“No, Cæsar,” said Amparito, drawing near him. “You don’t believe that I take pleasure in humiliating you. No, you know well that I do not.”

On saying this, Amparito burst into tears, and she had to lean against the gallery window, to hide her face and dissemble her emotion.

Cæsar took her hand, and as she did not turn her head, he seized her other, too. She looked at him with her eyes shining and full of tears; and in that look there was so much attachment, so much distress, that Cæsar felt a weakness in his whole frame. Then, taking Amparito’s head between his hands, he kissed it several times.

She leaned her head on Cæsar’s shoulder and stood pressed against him, sobbing. Cæsar felt a sensation of anguish and pain, as if within the depths of his soul, the strongest part of his personality had broken and melted.

They heard the footsteps of the old woman, coming back to say that she had found nothing in the room Laura had occupied during her stay.

Amparito dried her tears, and smiled, and her face was redder than usual. Presently she said to the nurse:

“Probably you didn’t look well. I am going to go myself.”

Amparito went out.

Cæsar was pale and absorbed; he felt that something extraordinary had happened to him. His hands trembled and things swam around him.

In a short while Amparito returned. She had a round glass box in her hand, which she said she had found in Laura’s room.

“This afternoon I am going to Our Lady of the Rock,” said Amparito. “Will you come, Cæsar?”

“Yes.”

“Then, good-bye till then.”

Amparito gave him her hand, and Cæsar kissed it. The old servant was dumfounded. Amparito burst out laughing.

“He is my beau. Hadn’t you noticed it before?”

“No,” said the old woman with a gesture of violent negation.

Amparito laughed again and disappeared.

The first days of his engagement Cæsar was constantly in-tranquil and uneasy. He kept thinking that it was impossible to live like that, giving his whole attention to nothing except the desires of a girl. He imagined that the awakening would come from one moment to the next; but the awakening didn’t arrive.

By degrees Cæsar abandoned all the affairs of the district, which had taken all his attention, and took to occupying himself solely with his sweetheart. The whole town knew their relations and talked of the coming wedding.

That dazzling idyll intrigued all the girls in Castro. The truth was that none of them had considered Cæsar a marrying man; some had imagined him already old; others an experienced and vicious bachelor, incapable of yielding to the matrimonial yoke; and now they saw him a youth, of distinguished type, with distinguished manners and looks.

Cæsar went almost daily to Amparito’s father’s country-place. It was a magnificent estate, another ancient property of the Dukes of Castro Duro, with a house adorned with escutcheons, and an extensive stone pool, deep and mysterious. The garden did not resemble that at Don Calixto’s house, for that one was of a frantic gaiety, and the one on Amparito’s father’s estate was very melancholy. Above all, the square of water in the pool, whose edges were decorated with great granite vases, had a mysterious, sad aspect.

“Doesn’t it make you very sad to look at this deep water in the pool?” Cæsar asked his fiancée.

“No, it doesn’t me.”

“It does me.”

“Because you are a poet,” she said, “and I am not; I am very prosaic.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

The more Cæsar talked with Amparito, the less he understood her and the more he needed to be with her.

“We really do not think the same about anything,” Cæsar used to tell himself, “and yet we understand each other.”

Many times he endeavoured to make a psychological résumé of Amparito’s character, but he didn’t succeed. He didn’t know how to classify her; her type always escaped him.

“All her notions are different from mine,” he used to think; “she speaks in another way, feels in another way, she even has a different moral code. How strange!”

Also, what Amparito knew was completely heterogeneous; she spoke French well and wrote it fairly correctly; in Spanish, on the other hand, she had no idea of spelling. Cæsar was always stupefied on seeing the transpositions of h’s, s’s, and z’s that she made in her letters.

There remained by Amparito, from her passage through the French school, a recollection of the history of France made up of a few anecdotes and a few phrases. Thus, it was not unusual to hear her speak of Turenne, of Francis I, or of Colbert. For the rest, she played the piano badly enough and with extremely little enthusiasm.

This was the part belonging to her education as a rich young lady; that which belonged to the country girl, who lived among peasants, was more curious and personal.

She knew many plants by their vulgar names, and understood their industrial and medicinal use. Besides, she spoke in such pure, natural phrases that Cæsar was filled with admiration.

Cæsar had reached such a degree of exaltation that he thought of nothing any more, except his sweetheart. At night, before going to sleep, he thought of her deliriously. He often dreamed that Amparito had changed into the red-flowered oleander of the wild palace garden, and in every flower of the oleander he used to see Amparito’s red lips and white teeth.

XIV. INTRANSIGENCE LOST

DISQUIET DISAPPEARS

The wedding took place and Cæsar had to compromise about a lot of things. It didn’t trouble him to confess and receive communion; he considered those mere customs, and went to the church of the Plain to conform to these practices with the old priest who was a friend of Amparito’s.

On the other hand, it did bother Cæsar to have to suffer Father Martin in his house, who allowed himself to talk and give advice; and he was also irritated by the presence of certain persons who considered themselves aristocrats and who came to call on him and point out to him that it was now time to give up the rabble and the indigent and to rise to their level.

If he had not had so much to think about as he did have, he would have found this a good chance to show his aggressive humour; but all his attention was fixed on Amparito.

The newly married pair spent the first days of their honeymoon at Castro; then they went to Madrid, with the intention of going abroad, and afterwards they went back to the town.

The old palace of the Dukes of Castro was witness to their idyll.

At the end of some time Cæsar felt tranquil, perhaps too tranquil.

“This, no doubt, is what is called being happy,” he used to say to himself. And being happy gave him the impression of a limbo; he felt as though his old personality was dying within him. He could no longer recover his former way of life; all his disquietudes had vanished. He felt that he was balanced, lacking those alternations of courage and cowardice which had previously formed the characteristic thing in him. It was the oasis after the desert; the calm that follows the storm.

Cæsar wondered if he had acquired new nerves. His instinct to be arbitrary was on the downward track.

He could not easily determine what role his wife played in his inner life. He felt the necessity of having her beside him, of talking to her; but he did not understand whether this was mere selfishness, for the sake of the soothing effect her presence produced, or was for the satisfaction of his vanity in seeing how she gave all her thought to him.

Spiritually he did not feel her either identified with him or strange to him; her soul marched along as if parallel to his, but in other paths.

“All that men say about women is completely false,” Cæsar used to think, “and what women say about themselves, equally so, because they merely repeat what men say. Only when they are completely emancipated will they succeed in understanding themselves. It is indubitable that we have not the same leading ideas, or the same points of view. Probably we have not a similar moral sense either. Neither is woman made for man, nor man for woman. There is necessity between them, not harmony.”

Many times, watching Amparito, he told himself:

“There is some sort of machinery in her head that I do not understand.”

Noting his scrutinizing gaze, she would ask him:

“What are you thinking about me?”

He would explain his perplexities, and she would laugh.

SYMPATHY

Indubitably, there existed an instinctive accord of the sentiments between Amparito and him, an organic sympathy. She could feel for them both, but he could not think for them both; each mental machine ran in isolation, like two watches, which do not hear each other. She knew whether Cæsar was sad or joyful, disheartened or spirited, merely by looking at him. She had no need to ask him; she could read Cæsar’s face. He could not, on his side, understand what went on behind that little forehead and those moist and sparkling eyes.

“Are you feeling happy? Are you feeling sad?” he would ask her. He could not reach the point of knowing by himself.

“I never succeed in knowing what you want,” he sometimes said to her, bitterly.

“Why, you always succeed,” she used to reply.

Cæsar often wondered if the rôle of being so much loved, whether wrong or right, was an absurd, offensive thing. In all great affections there is one peculiarity; if one loves a person, one gets to the point of changing that person to an idol inside oneself, and from that moment it seems that the person divides into the unreal idol, which is like a false picture of the adored one, and the living being, who resembles the idolized object very slightly.

Cæsar found something absurd in being loved like that. Besides, he found that she was dragging him away from himself. After six months of marriage, she was making him change his ideas and his way of life, and he was having absolutely no influence on her.

Previously he had often thought that if he lived with a woman, he should prefer one that was spiritually foreign to him, who should look on him like a rare plant, not with one that would want to identify herself with his tastes and his sympathies.

With a somewhat hostile woman he would have felt an inclination to be voluble and contradictory; with a sympathetic woman, on the contrary, he would have seemed to himself like a circus runner whom one of his pupils is trying to overtake, and who has to run hard to keep the record where it belongs.

But his wife was neither one nor the other.

Amparito had an extraordinary insouciance, gaiety, facility, in accepting life. Cæsar never ceased being amazed. She spent her days working, talking, singing. The slightest diversion enchanted her, the most insignificant gift aroused a lively satisfaction.

“Everything is decided, as far as you are concerned,” Cæsar used, to tell her.

“By what?”

“By your character.”

She laughed at that.

It seemed as if she had chosen the best attitude toward life. She saw that her husband was not religious, but she considered that an attribute of men, and thought that God must have an especial complacency toward husbands, if only so as not to leave wives alone in paradise.

Amparito held by a fetichistic Catholicism, conditioned by her situation in life, and mixed with a lot of heterodox and contradictory ideas, but she didn’t give any thought to that.

The marriage was very successful; they never had disputes or discussions. When both were stubborn, they never noticed which one yielded.

They had rented one rather big floor facing on the Retiro, and they began to furnish it.

Amparito had bad taste in decoration; everything loud pleased her, and sometimes when Cæsar laughed, she would say:

“I know I am a crazy country girl. You must tell me how to fix things.”

Cæsar decided the arrangement of a little reception-room. He chose a light paper for the walls, some coloured engravings, and Empire furniture. Female friends found the room very well done. Amparito used to tell them:

“Yes, Cæsar had it done like this,” as if that were a weighty argument with everybody.

Amparito and her father persuaded Cæsar that he ought to open an office. All the people in Castro lamented that Cæsar did not practise law.

He had always felt a great repugnance for that sharpers’ and skinflints’ business; but he yielded to please Amparito, and set up his office and took an assistant who was very skillful in legal tricks. Cæsar was often to be found writing in the office, when Amparito opened the door.

“Do you want to come here a moment?” she would say.

“Yes. What is it?”

“Look and see how this hat suits me. How do you like it?”

Cæsar would laugh and say:

“I think you ought to take off the flowers, or it ought to be smaller.”

Amparito accepted Cæsar’s suggestions as if they had been, articles of faith.

Cæsar, on his part, had a great admiration for his wife. What strength for facing life! What amazing energy!

“I walk among brambles and leave a piece of my clothing on every one of them,” thought Cæsar, “and she passes artlessly between all obstacles, with the ease of an ethereal thing. It’s extraordinary!”

It pleased Amparito to be thus observed.

Her husband used to tell her:

“You have, as it were, ten or twelve Amparitos inside of you; it often seems to me that you are a whole round of Amparitos.”

“Well, you are not more than one Cæsar to me.”

“That’s because I have the ugly vice of talking and of being consequential.”

“Don’t I talk?”

“Yes, in another way.”

_DOUBT_

In the spring they went to Castro, and the members of the Workmen’s Club presented themselves before Cæsar to remind him of a project for a Co-operative and a School, which he had promised them. They were all ready to put up what was necessary for realizing both plans.

Cæsar listened to them, and although with great coldness, said yes, that he was ready to initiate the scheme. A few days later, in Dr. Ortigosa’s _Protest_, there was enthusiastic talk of the Great Co-operative, which, when established, would improve, and at the same time cheapen necessary articles.

The same day that the paper came out with this news, a commission of the shopkeepers of Castro waited on Cæsar. The scheme would ruin them. It was especially the small shopkeepers that considered themselves most injured.

Cæsar replied that he would think it over and decide in an equitable manner, looking for a way to harmonize the interests of all people. Really he didn’t know what to do, and as he had no great desire to begin new undertakings, he wanted to call the Co-operative dead, but Dr. Ortigosa was not disposed to abandon the idea.

“It is certain that if goods are made cheaper,” said the doctor, “and the Co-operative is opened to the public, the shopkeepers will have to fight it, and then either they or we shall be ruined; but something else can be done, and that is to sell articles to the public at the same price as the tradesmen, and arrange it that members get a dividend from the profits of the society. In that way there will be no fight, at any rate not at first.”

They tried to do it that way, but it did not satisfy the poor people, or calm the shopkeepers.

Cæsar, who had lost his lust for a fight, put the scheme aside; and although it would cost him more, decided to have the construction of the school begun.

The Municipality ceded the lot and granted a subsidy of five thousand pesetas to start the work; Cæsar gave ten thousand, and at the Workmen’s Club a subscription was opened, and performances were given in the theatre to collect funds.

The school promised to be a spacious edifice with a beautiful garden. The corner-stone was laid in the presence of the Governor of the Province, and despite the fact that the founders’ intention was to found a lay school, the Clerical element took part in the celebration.

When the work began, the majority of the members of the Club were shocked to find that the masons, instead of working on the same conditions as for other jobs, asked more pay, as if the school where their sons might study were an institution more harmful than beneficial for them.

Cæsar, on learning this, smiled bitterly and said:

“They are not obliged to be less of brutes than the bourgeoisie.”

From Madrid Cæsar continued sending maps for the school, engravings, bas-reliefs, a moving-picture machine.

Dr. Ortigosa and his friends went every day to look over the work.

A year from the beginning of work, the boys and girls’ school was opened. Dr. Ortigosa succeeded in arranging that two of the three male teachers they procured were Free-Thinkers. One of them, a poor man who had lived a dog’s life in some town in Andalusia, was reputed to be an anarchist. They appointed three female teachers too, two old, and one young, a very attractive and clever girl, who came from a town near Bilboa.

Cæsar took part in the opening, and spoke, and received enthusiastic applause. Despite which, Cæsar felt ill at ease among his old friends; in his heart he knew that he was deserting them. He now thought it unlikely, almost impossible, that that town should succeed in emerging from obscurity and meaning something in modern life. Moreover, he doubted about himself, began to think that he was not a hero, began to believe that he had assigned himself a role beyond his powers; and this precisely at the moment when the town had the most faith in him.

XV. “DRIVELLER” JUAN AND “THE CUB-SLUT”

_A MURDER_

“Driveller” Juan, the town dandy protected by Father Martín, had from childhood distinguished himself by his cowardice and by his tendency to bullying. His appearance was that of an idiot; people said he drivelled; whence they gave him the nickname of “Driveller” Juan. He lived by pretending to be terrible in the gambling houses, and bragged of having been in prison several times.

The Clericals had made “Driveller” the janitor of the Benevolent Society, and at the same time its bully, so that he could inspire terror; but as he was a coward in reality, and this was evident, he did not succeed in terrifying the members of the Workmen’s Club.

“Driveller” Juan was tall, red-headed, with high cheek bones, knotty hands, and a pendulous lip; his father, like him, had been bony and strong, and for that reason had been called “Big Bones.”

“Driveller,” like the coward he was, knew that he was not filling his job; one day he had dared to go to a ball at the Workmen’s Club, and San Román, the old Republican, had gone to him and tapped him on the arm, saying:

“Listen here, ‘Driveller,’ get out right now and don’t you come back.”

“Why should I?”

“Because you are not wanted.”

Juan had gone away like a whipped dog. “Driveller” wanted to do a manly action, and he did it.

There was a boy belonging to the Workmen’s Club, who was called “Lengthy,” one of the few type-setters in the town, a clever, facetious lad who now and then wrote an article for _The Protest_.

“Driveller” insisted that “Lengthy” wanted to make fun of him. No doubt he chose him for his victim, because he was so slim, lanky, and weak; perhaps he had some other reason for attacking him. One afternoon, at twilight, “Driveller” halted “Lengthy,” demanded an explanation, insulted him, and on finding his victim made no reply, gave him a blow. The street was wet, and “Driveller” stepped on a fruit-skin and fell headlong. Seeing the bully infuriated, “Lengthy” started to run, came to an open door, and ran rapidly up the stairs. “Driveller,” furious, ran after him. Pursued and pursuer went down a hallway and “Lengthy” managed to reach a door and close it. “Driveller’s” revengeful fury was not satisfied; he lay in wait until “Lengthy,” believing himself alone, tried to escape from his hiding-place and was walking down the hall, and then “Driveller” drew his pistol and fired with the mouth against “Lengthy’s” shoulder, and left him dead. As it was a rainy day, both the dead man’s footsteps and the murderer’s could be followed and everything that had happened ascertained.

The impression produced in the town by this assassination was enormous. Some people said that Father Martin and his followers had ordered “Lengthy” killed. In the Workmen’s Club there was talk of setting fire to the Benevolent Society of Saint Joseph and of burning the monastery of la Peña.

Cæsar was in Madrid at the time of the crime. Some days later a committee from the Club came to see him; it was necessary to have a charge pushed and for Cæsar to be the private attorney.

According to the Club people, the Clericals wanted to save “Driveller” Juan, and if he was not disposed of completely, he would begin his performances again.

Cæsar could see nothing for it but to accept the duty which the town put upon him.

Because of the crime, the history of “Driveller’s” family came to be public property. He had a mother and two sisters who were seamstresses, whom he exploited, and he lived with a tavern-keeper nicknamed “The Cub-Slut,” a buxom, malicious woman, who said horrible things about everybody.

* * * * *

_LIFE OF “THE CUB-SLUT”_

There were reasons for “The Cub-Slut’s” being what she was. Her parents being dead when she was a baby, having no relatives she had been left deserted. A farrier they called “Gaffer,” who seemed to have been a kind person, took in the infant and brought her up in his house. It was “Gaffer” who had given the nickname to the child, because instead of calling her by her name, he used to say:

“Hey, ‘Cub-Slut!’ Hey, little ‘Cub-Slut!’” and the appellation had stuck.

When the girl was fourteen, “Gaffer” ravished her, and afterwards, being tired of her, took her to a house of prostitution in the Capital and sold her. “The Cub-Slut” left the brothel to go and live with an old innkeeper, who died and made her his heiress. Six years later she went back to Castro. Those that had seen her come back maintained that when she reached the town and was told that “Gaffer” had died a few months before, she burst into tears; some said it was from sentiment, but others thought, very plausibly, that it was from rage at not being able to get revenge. “The Cub-Slut” set up a tavern at Castro.

“Driveller” and “The Cub-Slut” got along well, although, by what any one could discover, “The Cub-Slut” treated the bully more like a servant than anything else.

“The Cub-Slut” was said to be very outspoken. One Sunday, on the promenade, she had answered one of the young ladies of Castro rudely. The young lady was the daughter of a millionaire, who had married after having several children by a mistress of pretty bad reputation. The millionaire’s children had been educated in aristocratic schools, and his girls were very elegant young ladies; even the mother got to be refined and polished. One Sunday, on the promenade, one of them, on passing near “The Cub-Slut,” said in a low tone to her mother:

“Dear Lord, what riff-raff!”

And “The Cub-Slut,” hearing her, stopped and said violently:

“There’s no riff-raff here except your mother and me. Now you know it.”

The young lady was so upset by the harsh retort that she didn’t leave the house again for a long while.

Such rude candour on “The Cub-Slut’s” part had made her feared; so that nobody durst provoke her in the slightest degree. Besides, her history and her misfortune were known and people knew that she was not a vicious woman, but rather a victim of fate.

The assassination of “Lengthy” was one of those events that are not forgotten in a town. “Lengthy” was the son of “Gaffer,” “The Cub-Slut’s” protector, and some people imagined that she had persuaded “Driveller” to commit the crime; but the members of the Workmen’s Club continued to believe that it was a case of clerical revenge.

_“THE CUB-SLUT’S” ARGUMENT_

In the month of June, Cæsar and Amparito went to Castro Duro.

One afternoon when Cæsar was alone in the garden, a very buxom woman appeared before him, wearing a mantilla and dressed in black.

“I came in without anybody seeing me,” she said. “Your porter, ‘Wild Piglet,’ let me pass. I know that Amparito is not here.”

She didn’t say “Your wife,” or “Your lady,” but “Amparito.”

“Tell me what you want,” said Cæsar, looking at the woman with a certain dread.

“I am the woman that lives with ‘Driveller’ Juan.”

“Ah! You are...?” “Yes. ‘The Cub-Slut.’”

Cæsar looked at her attentively. She was of the aquiline type seen on Iberian coins, her nose arched, eyes big and black, thin-lipped mouth, and a protruding chin. She noticed his scrutiny, and stood as if on her guard.

“Sit down, if you will, please, and tell me what you wish.”

“I am all right,” she replied, continuing to stand; then, precipitately, she said, “What I want is for them not to punish Juan more than is just.”

“I don’t believe he will be punished unjustly,” responded Cæsar.

“The whole town says that if you speak against him in court, the punishment will be heavier.”

“And you want me not to speak?”

“That’s it.”

“It seems to me to be asking too much. I shall do no more than insist that they punish him justly.”

“There is no way to get out of it?”

“None.”

“If you wanted to... I would wait on you on my knees afterwards, I would make any sacrifice for you.”

“Are you so fond of the man?”

“The Cub-Slut” answered in the negative, by an energetic movement of her head.

“Well, then, what do you expect to get out of him?”

“I expect revenge.”

“The Cub-Slut’s” eyes flashed.

“Is what they say about you true?” asked Cæsar.

“Yes.”

“The dead boy was the son of the man that sold you?”

“Yes.”

“But to revenge oneself on the son for the sin of the father is horrible.”

“The son was just as wicked as the father.”

“So that you ordered him killed?”

“Yes, I did.”

“And you come and tell that to me, when I am to be the private attorney.” “Have them arrest me. I don’t care.”

“The Cub-Slut” stood firm before Cæsar, provocative, with flashing eyes, in an attitude of challenge.

“You hated that dead boy so much as this?”

“Yes, him and all his family.”

“I can understand that if the father were alive, you might...”

“If he were alive! I would give my life to drag him out of his tomb, so as to make him suffer as much as he made me suffer.”

Cæsar vaguely remembered the story he had heard about this woman, whose adopted father had ruined her and then left her in a disreputable house in the Capital. In general, the most absolute lack of apprehension characterizes such village tragedies, and neither does the victim know she is a victim, nor the villain that he is a villain.

But in this case, judging by what “The Cub-Slut” was telling him, it had not been so; “Gaffer” had gone about it with a certain depravity, glutting his desires on her, and then selling her, putting her into an infamous house. The villain had been cruel and intelligent; the victim had realized that she was one, to the degree that her soul was filled with desires for vengeance.

“That man,” “The Cub-Slut” ended, sobbing, “took away my name and gave me a nickname; took away my honour, my life, everything; and if I cannot be revenged on him because he is dead, I will be revenged on his family.”

Cæsar listened attentively to the woman’s explanation, without interrupting her. Then, when she had finished speaking, he said:

“And why not go away?”

“Away? Where?” she asked, astonished.

“Anywhere. The world is so big! Why do you persist in living in the one spot where people know you and have a bad opinion of you? Go away from here. There are countries with more generous sentiments than these old corners of the world. You do not consider yourself infamous or vile.”

“No, no.”

“Then go away from here. To America, to Australia, anywhere. Perhaps you can reconstruct your life. At any rate, nobody will call you by your nickname; nobody will talk familiarly to you. You will conquer or you will be conquered in the struggle for life. That’s evident. You will share the common lot, but you will not be vilified. Do go.”

“The Cub-Slut” listened to Cæsar with eyes cast down. When he ceased, she stood looking at him intently, and then, without a word, she disappeared.

XVI. PITY, A MASK OF COWARDICE

_THE MOTHER_

Some days later Cæsar was in his office, when a thin old woman, dressed in black, shot in, crossed the room, and fell on her knees before him. Cæsar jumped up in disgust.

“What’s this? What’s going on here?” he asked.

Amparito entered the room and explained what was going on. The old woman was “Driveller” Juan’s mother. People had told Juan’s mother that the only obstacle to her son’s salvation from death was Cæsar, and she had come to implore him not to let them condemn Juan to death.

“My poor son is a good boy,” moaned the old creature; “a woman made him commit the crime.”

Cæsar listened, silent and gloomy, without speaking, and then left the room. Amparito remained with the old woman, consoling her and trying to quiet her.

That night Amparito returned to the task, and dragged the promise from her husband that he would not act as private attorney at the trial.

Cæsar was ashamed and saddened; he didn’t care to go to see anybody; he was committing treason against his cause.

“Pity will finish my work or finish me,” thought Cæsar, walking about his room. “That poor old woman is worthy of compassion; that is undeniable. She believes her son is a good boy, and he really is a low, cowardly ruffian. I ought not to pay any attention to this plea, but insist on their condemning that miserable wretch to death. But I haven’t any more energy; I haven’t any more strength. I can feel that I am going to yield; the mother’s grief moves me, and I do not consider that if this bully goes free, he is going to turn the town upside down and ruin all our work. I am lost.”

_FLIGHT_

Cæsar confided to his wife that he was daunted; his lack of courage was a nightmare to him.

Amparito said that they ought to take a long trip. Laura had invited them to come to Italy. It was the best thing they could do.

Cæsar accepted her solution, and, as a matter of fact, they went to Madrid and from there to Italy.

The Workmen’s Club telegraphed to Cæsar when the time for the trial came, and Amparito answered the telegram from Florence, saying that her husband was ill.

Never had Cæsar felt so agitated as then. He bought the Spanish newspapers, and expected to find in some one of them the words: “Señor Moncada is a coward,” or “Señor Moncada is a sorry creature and a traitor.”

When they knew that judgment had been pronounced and Juan condemned to eight years in the penitentiary, they returned to Madrid.

Cæsar felt humiliated and ashamed; he did not dare show himself in Castro. The congratulations that some people sent him on the restoration of his health made his cheeks hot with shame in the solitude of his office.

The editor of a newspaper in the Capital of the Province came to call on Cæsar, who was so dispirited that he confided to his visitor that he was ready to retire from politics. Two days later Cæsar saw a big headline on the first page of the Conservative newspaper of the Capital, which said: “Moncada is about to retire.”

Amparito applauded her husband’s decision, and Cæsar made melancholy plans for the future, founded on the renunciation of all struggle.

A few days later Cæsar received a letter from Castro Duro which made him quiver. It was signed by Dr. Ortigosa, by San Román, Camacho, the apothecary, and the leading members of the Workmen’s Club. The letter was in the doctor’s handwriting. It read thus:

“Dear Sir: We have read in the newspaper from the Capital the announcement that you are thinking of retiring from politics. We believe this announcement is not true. We cannot think that you, the champion of liberty in Castro Duro, would abandon so noble a cause, and leave the town exposed to the intrigues and the evil tricks of the Clericals. There is no question in this of whether it would suit you better to retire from politics, or not. That is of no importance. There is a question of what would suit our country and Liberty better.

“If because of the seductions of an easy life, you should withdraw from us and desert us, you would have committed the crime of lèse-civilization; you would have slain in its flower the re-birth of the spiritual and civic life of Castro.

“We do not believe you capable of such cowardice and such infamy, and since we do not believe you capable of it, we beg you to come to Castro Duro as soon as possible to direct the approaching municipal elections.--Dr. Ortigosa, Antonio San Román, José Camacho.”

On reading this letter Cæsar felt as if he had been struck with a whip. Those men were correct; he had no right to retire from the fight.

This conviction supported him.

“I have to go to Castro,” he said to Amparito.

“But didn’t you say that...?”

“Yes, but it is impossible.”

Amparito realized that her husband’s decision was final, and she said:

“All right; let us go to Castro.”

XVII. FIRST VICTORY

The Conservatives had come into power; the time to change the town government was approaching. It was customary at Castro, as in all rural districts in Spain, that in a period of Liberal administration the majority of the councillors elected should be Liberal, and at a time of Conservative government, they should be Conservative.

The former Liberal, García Padilla, had gone over to the Conservative camp, and one was now to see whether he would get his friends into the Municipality so as to prepare for his own election as Deputy later.

It was the first time there was going to be a real election at Castro Duro. Moncada’s candidates were almost all persons of good position. Dr. Ortigosa and a Socialist weaver figured among the candidates, as representing the revolutionary tendency. The Liberals felt and showed an unusual activity and anxiety. Cæsar started a newspaper which he named Liberty, Dr. Ortigosa was the soul of this paper, whose doctrines ran from Liberal Monarchy to Anarchy, inclusive. As the election drew nearer, the agitation increased.

In the two electoral headquarters established by Moncada’s party, the coming and going never stopped; some enthusiastic Moncadists came to headquarters every fifteen minutes, to bring rumours going about and to get news.

Don So-and-So had said this; Uncle What’s-His-Name was thinking of doing that; it was nothing but conferences and machinations. The painter had painted for them gratis a big poster expressing cheers for Liberty, for Moncada, Dr. Ortigosa, and the Liberal candidates. The café keeper brought chairs, without any one’s asking him; somebody else brought a brasier for the clerks; everybody was anxious to do something. The stock phrase, an electoral battle, was not for them a political commonplace but a reality. The most trivial things served as a motive for very long discussions. Such was their identification with the Idea, that it succeeded in wiping out selfish ends. They all felt honoured and enthusiastic, at least while it lasted.

People dreamed of the election.

When Cæsar arrived at the electoral headquarters, it was always a series of exclamations, of embracing, of advice, that never ended.

“Don Cæsar, such a thing is... Don Cæsar, don’t trust So-and-So.”

“We must get rid of them.”

“Not one of them ought to be left.”

He used to smile, because finding himself really loved by the people had cleansed him of his habitual bitterness and his loss of spirits. When he had finished receiving recommendations and congratulations, he would go to an inside room, and there, in the company of a candidate or a secretary, would read letters and arrange what they had to do.

The most active of the candidates was Dr. Ortigosa.

Ortigosa was a narrow-minded, tenacious man. His chief hatred was for Catholicism and he directed all his attacks at the religion of his forefathers, as he ironically termed it.

He had founded a Masonic lodge, named the “Microbe,” and whose principal characteristic was anti-Catholicism.

Ortigosa carried his propaganda everywhere. He stopped at every corner to speechify, to talk of his plans.

Cæsar used his motor-car to go about among the villages in the district. They would go to four or five and talk from balconies, or very often from the car, like itinerant patent-medicine venders.

In the little villages these reunions produced a great effect. What was said served as a topic of conversation for a month.

Cæsar had developed a clear, insinuating eloquence. He knew how to explain things admirably. Padilla’s followers were not asleep; but, as was natural, they took up the work in another way. They went from shop to shop, making the shopkeepers see the harmfulness of the Moncadist politics, promising them advantages. They threatened workmen with dismissal. There was no great enthusiasm; their campaign was less noisy, but, in part more certain.

All the Liberal element of Castro was wrought up, from the temperate Liberals, who remembered Espartero, to the Anarchists. “Whiskers” and “Furibis” were the only ones who got together in a tavern to talk about bombs and dynamite, and one could be sure that neither of them was capable of anything. Those two had nothing more to do with Ortigosa, considering him a deserter.

“You are imbeciles,” the doctor told them, with his habitual fury. “This fight is waking the people up. They are beginning to show their instincts, and that makes a man strong. The longer and more violent this fight is, the better; progress will be so much quicker.”

“Agitation, agitation is what we need,” cried the doctor; and he himself was as agitated as a man condemned.

The Liberals won a great victory; they obtained eight places out of ten vacancies.

XVIII. DECLARATION OF WAR

The new city government of Castro was the most extraordinary that could be imagined. Dr. Ortigosa presented motions which caused the greatest astonishment and stupefaction, not only in the town, but in the whole province. He conceived magnificent plans and extravagant ideas. He asked to have the teaching system changed, religious festivals suppressed and other ones instituted, property abolished, public baths installed, and that Castro Duro should break with Rome.

The doctor was a creature born to succeed those revolutionary eagle-men, like Robespierre and Saint Just, and condemned to live in a miserable chicken-yard.

One day when Cæsar was working in his office, he was astounded to see Father Martin enter.

Father Martin greeted Cæsar like an old acquaintance; he had come to ask him a favour. Suspicious, Cæsar prepared to listen. After speaking of the business that had brought him, the friar began to criticize the town-government of Castro and to say that it was a veritable mad-house.

“Your friends,” said the priest, smiling, “are unrestrained. They want to change everything in three days. Dr. Ortigosa is a crazy man....”

“To my mind, he is the only man in Castro that deserves my estimation.”

“Yes?”

“Yes.”

“This demoniac says that for him traditions have no value whatsoever.”

“Oh! I think the same thing,” said Cæsar. “Are you anti-historic?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“Absolutely. Tradition has no value for me either.”

“The basis of tradition,” answered the friar, arguing like a man who carries the whole of human knowledge in the pocket of his habit, “is the confidence we all have in the experience of our predecessors. Whether I be a labourer or a pastor, even though I have lived fifty years, I may have great experience about my work and about life, but it will never be so great as the united experience of all those who have preceded me. Can I scorn the accumulation of wisdom that past generations hand down to us?”

“If you wish me to tell you the truth, for me your argument has no weight,” answered Cæsar coldly.

“No?”

“No. It is undeniable that there is a sum of knowledge that comes from father to son, from one labourer to another, and from one pastor to another. But what value have these rudimentary, vague experiences, compared to the united experience of all the men of science there have been in the world? It is as if you told me that the stock of knowledge of a quack was greater and better than that of a wise physician.”

“I am not talking,” answered the Father, “of pure science. I am talking of applied science. Is one of your universal savants going to occupy himself with the way of sowing or of threshing in Castro?”

“Yes. He has already occupied himself with it, because he has occupied himself with the way of sowing or threshing in general, and, what is more, with the variations in the processes that may be occasioned by the kind of soil, the climate, etc.”

“And do you believe that such scientific pragmatism can be substituted for the natural pragmatism born of the people’s loins, created by them through centuries and centuries of life?”

“Yes. That is to say, I believe it can purify it; that it can cast out of this pragmatism, as you call it, all that is wrong, absurd, and false and keep what good there may be.” “And for you the absurd and false is Catholic morality.”

“It is.”

“You are not willing to discuss whether Catholicism is true or is a lie; you consider it a ruinous doctrine which produces decadence. I have been told that you have stated that on various occasions.”

“It is true. I have said so.”

“Then we do not agree. Catholicism is useful; Catholicism is efficient.”

“For what? For this life?”

“Yes.”

“No. Pshaw! It may be useful when it comes to dying? Where there is Catholicism there is ruin and misery.”

“Nevertheless, there is no misery in Belgium.”

“Certainly there is none, but in that country Catholicism is not what it is in Spain.”

“Of course it isn’t,” exclaimed the friar, shouting, “because what characterizes Spanish Catholicism is Spain, poverty-stricken, fanatic Spain, and not the Catholicism.”

“I do not believe we are going to understand each other,” replied Cæsar; “what seems a cause to me is an effect for you.... Besides, we are getting away from the question. To you Castro’s moral and intellectual state seems good, does it not?”

“Yes.”

“Well, to me it seems horrifying. Sordid vice, obscure adultery; gambling, bullying, usury, hunger... You think it ought to keep on being just as it was before I was Deputy for the District. Do you not?”

“I do.”

“That I have been a disturbance, an enemy to public tranquillity.”

“Exactly.”

“Well, this state of things that you find admirable, seems to me bestially fanatical, repugnantly immoral, repulsively vile.”

“Of course, for you are a pessimist about things as they are, like any good revolutionist. You believe that you are going to improve life at Castro. You alone?” “I, united with others.”

“And meanwhile you introduce anarchy into the city.”

“I introduce anarchy! No. I introduce order. I want to finish with the anarchy already reigning in Castro and make it submit to a thought, to a worthy, noble thought.”

“And by what right do you arrogate to yourself the power to do this?”

“By the right of being the stronger.”

“Ah! Good. If you should get to be the weaker, you ought not to complain if we should misuse our strength.”

“Complain! When you have been misusing it for thousands of years! At this very moment, we do the talking, we make the protests, but you people give the orders.”

“We offset your idiotic behaviour. We stand in the way of your utopias. Do you think you are going to solve the problem of this earth, and that of Capital? Are you going to solve the sexual question? Are you going to institute a society without inequality or injustice, as Dr. Ortigosa said in _La Libertad_ the other day? To me it seems very difficult.”

“To me too. But that is what there is to try for.”

“And when will you attain so perfect an arrangement, so great a harmony, as the Catholic, created in twenty centuries? When?”

“We shall attain a different, better harmony.”

“Oh, I doubt it.”

“Naturally. That is just what the pagans might have said to the Christians; and perhaps with reason, because Christianity, compared to paganism, was a retrogression.”

“That point we cannot discuss,” said Father Lafuerza, getting up.

Cæsar got up too.

“In spite of all this, I admire you, because I believe you are sincere,” said Father Martin. “But I believe you to be dangerous and I should be happy to get you out of Castro.”

“I feel the same way about you, and I should also be happy to get you out of here, as an unwholesome element.”

“So that we are open, loyal enemies.” “Loyal! Pshaw! We are ready to do each other all the harm possible.”

“For my part, yes, and in any way,” announced the priest with energy.

“I, too,” Cæsar answered; and he raised the curtain of the office door.

“Don’t disturb yourself,” said Father Martin.

“Oh, it’s no trouble.”

“Regards to Amparito.”

“Thank you.”

The friar hesitated about going out, as if he wanted to return to the attack.

“Afterwards, if you repent...” he said.

“I shall not repent,” Cæsar coldly replied.

“I will drink peace to you.”

“Yes, if I submit. I will drink peace to you too, if I submit.”

“You are going to play a dangerous game.”

“It will be no less dangerous for you than for me.”

“You are playing for your head.”

“Pshaw! We will play for it and win it.”

The friar bowed, and smiling in a forced manner, left the house.

XIX. THE FIGHT FOR THE ELECTION

The Conservatives at Castro Duro were ready to commit the greatest outrages and the most arbitrary acts so as to win by any methods.

It was known that a committee consisting of García Padilla, Father Martín Lafuerza, and two Conservative councillors had gone to the Minister of the Interior to beg that Cæsar’s victory might be prevented by whatsoever means.

“It is necessary that Don Cæsar Moncada should not be elected for the District,” said Father Martín. “If he is, the town will remain subjected to a revolutionary dictatorship. All the Conservative classes, the merchants, the religious communities, fervently hope that Moncada will not be made Deputy.”

The committee of Castrians visited other high personages, and they must have attained their object, because the municipal government was suspended a few days later, the Workmen’s Club closed, the judge transferred, the Civil Guard was reinforced, and a police inspector of the worst antecedents was detailed to Castro as commissioner of elections.

The Governor of the Province, a political enemy of Cæsar’s, was a personal friend of his.

“For your sake I am ready to lose my future,” he had said to him, “but as for your followers, there is nothing left for me to do but knock them over the head.”

_La Libertad_, Cæsar’s newspaper, made a very violent campaign against García Padilla. Ortigosa succeeded in finding out that Padilla had been tried for embezzlement, and he published that fact. The _Castro News_, on its side, insulted Cæsar and called him a crooked speculator on the exchange, an upstart, and an atheist.

The rapidity and violence of the Government’s methods produced an effect of fear on lukewarm Liberals; on the other hand, it moved the decided ones to show themselves all the more courageous and rash.

Moncada’s party almost immediately took on a revolutionary character. The lodge, “The Microbe,” was at work, and the most radical arrangements started there. It suited the Government and the Conservatives to have the Moncada party take this demagogic character. The commissioner had contaminating persons come on from the Capital for the purpose of sowing discord in the Workmen’s Club.

These suspicious persons, directed by one they called “Sparkler,” used to gather in the taverns to corrupt the workmen and the peasants, carrying on a propaganda that was anarchistic in appearance, but in reality anti-liberal.

“They are all the same,” they used to say; “Liberals and Conservatives are not a bit different.”

The drunkards and vagabonds were in their glory during those days, eating and drinking. Nobody knew for certain where the money came from, but everybody could make certain that it flowed profusely.

At the same time the commissioner had the most prominent workmen of the Club arrested and brought suit against them on ridiculous accusations.

_THE MEETING_

The Liberals tried to hold a manifestation in protest, but the commissioner and the mayor prohibited it.

The newspaper _La Libertad_ explained what was going on, and was reprimanded.

A meeting was organized at the school; the governor had granted permission.

The school was not lighted, and Cæsar sent a man to the Capital for acetylene lamps, which were put up on the walls, and which made a detestable smell. The reunion took place at nine at night. Cæsar presided, and had San Román, the bookseller, on his right, and Dr. Ortigosa on his left.

Behind them on a bench were some of the members of the Workmen’s Club.

The audience was composed of the poorest people; the rich Liberal element was drawing back; there were day-labourers with blankets around their shoulders and mouths, women in shawls holding children in their arms. Among the audience were the _agents provocateurs_ who doubtless had the intention of making a disturbance; but the Republican bookseller ordered them thrown out of the place, and, despite their resistance, he managed to have it done.

The chief of police, insolent and contemptuous, took his seat at the table with an officer of the Civil Guard in civilian’s, who was there, he said, to take notes.

San Román, the bookseller, gave Cæsar a paper with the names of those who were going to speak. They were many, and Cæsar didn’t know them.

The first to whom he gave the floor, in the order of the list, was a lame boy, who came forward on a crutch, and began to speak.

The boy expressed himself with great enthusiasm and admirable candour.

“Who is this youngster?” Cæsar asked San Román.

“He is the best pupil in our school. We call him ‘Limpy.’ He comes of a very poor family. He came to the school a year ago, knowing nothing, and see him now. He says, and I think he is right, that if he keeps on studying, he will be an eminent man.”

The audience applauded everything “Limpy” said, and when he finished they hailed him with shouts and cheers. As he went back to his seat, Cæsar and San Román shook his hand effusively.

_STAND FAST, FELLOW CITIZENS!_

After “Limpy,” various orators spoke, in divers keys: “Furibis,” “Uncle Chinaman,” “Panza,” San Román, a weaver, a railway employee, and Dr. Ortigosa. The last-named let loose, and launched into such violent terms that the audience shouted in horrified excitement. Cæsar’s speech recommended firmness, and caused scarcely any reaction. The note had been given by “Limpy,” with his ingenuousness and his appealing quality, and by the doctor with the violence of his words.

The next day the Governor’s commissioner gave orders to close the school, and Dr. Ortigosa and San Román were taken to jail.

_POLITICAL TRICKS_

It was impossible to carry on a campaign of popular agitation, and Cæsar decided to open a headquarters for propaganda next door to each voting place.

Meetings in the villages had been suppressed, because at the least alarm, or even without any motive, the chief of police, with members of the Civil Guard, went in among the people and dispersed them by shoving and by pounding rifles on their feet.

The newspapers couldn’t say anything without being immediately reported and suspended.

Cæsar sent no telegrams of protest, but he kept at work silently. He was thinking of using all weapons, including even trickery and bribes.

García Padilla and the Government agents found this proceeding even more dangerous than the former. Cæsar offered twenty dollars to anybody that would give information of any electoral sharp practices which could be proved. The week of the election he and his friends did not rest.

At one of the polls in Carrascal, where Cæsar had a majority, the tile bearing the house-number had been changed by night. The real voters had to wait to cast their votes in one place, and meanwhile the urn was being filled with ballots for the Government candidate at another place.

In the hamlet of Val de San Gil, another trick was tried; the polling place was established in a hay-loft to which one went up by a ladder. While the villagers were waiting for the ladder to be set up, the urn was being filled. When the ladder was put into place and the voters went up one by one, they found that they had all voted already. As the ladder was narrow, they had to go up singly, and it was not likely they would have ventured to protest. Besides, there were a number of ruffians in the place, armed with sticks and pistols, who were ready to club or to shoot any one protesting.

In spite of all, Cæsar had the election won, always supposing that the Government did not carry things to the limit; but at the last moment he learned that more Civil Guards were going to come to Castro, and that the Government agents had orders to prevent Moncada’s victory by any method.

In the evening on Saturday, Cæsar was told that the commissioner was in a tavern, with others of the police, giving out ballots for illegal voters. Cæsar went there alone, and entered the tavern.

The commissioner, on seeing him, grew confused.

“I know what you are doing,” said Cæsar. “Be careful, because it may cost you a term in prison.”

“You are the one that may have to pay by going to prison,” replied the inspector.

“Just try to arrest me, you poor fool, and I’ll shoot your head off!”

The police inspector jumped up from the table where he was seated, and, as he went out, he let one of the ballots fall. Cæsar looked over the men who were with the police inspector; one of them was “Sparkler.” Some days before he had come to Moncada’s headquarters to offer to work for him, and he was the director of the contaminating persons sent to Castro by the Government.

A CLANDESTINE MEETING

When he returned to the headquarters, they told him there was a meeting in “Furibis’s” tavern at nine that night. Cæsar got there a little later than the time set. The place was gloomy, and had some big earthen jars in it. They had put a table at the back of this cave, and an acetylene light illuminated it.

Those present formed a semicircle around the table.

Cæsar knocked at the tavern, and they opened the door to him; a workman who was speaking delayed his peroration, and they waited until Cæsar had reached the table and got seated. The atmosphere was suffocating. Everything was closed so that the Civil Guards would not see the light through the windows and suspect that there was a meeting being held there. The workmen were, for the most part, masons, weavers, brickmakers. There were women there with their little ones asleep in their bosoms. The air one breathed there was horrible. It looked like a gathering of desperate people. They had learned that their arrested comrades had been beaten in the prison, and that San Román and Dr. Ortigosa were in the infirmary as a result.

_EULOGY OF VIOLENCE_

The excitement among those present was terrible. “Limpy” was the most strenuous; he was in favour of their all going out that moment and storming the jail.

When they had all spoken, Cæsar got up and asked them to wait. If he won the election the next day, he promised them that the prisoners should be freed immediately; if he did not win and the prisoners remained there...

“Then what is to be done?” said a voice.

“What is to be done? I am in favour of violence,” answered Cæsar; “burning the jail, setting fire to the whole town; I am ready for anything.”

At that moment he really did think he had been too lenient.

“Man’s first duty is to break the law,” he shouted, “when it is a bad law. Everything is due to violence and war. I will go to the post of danger this very second, whenever you wish. Shall we storm the jail? Let’s go right now.”

This storming of the jail didn’t seem an easy thing to the others. One might try to climb down the hill and surprise the prison guards, but it would be difficult. According to “Furibis,” the best thing would be for ten or twelve of them to go out into the street with guns and pistols and shoot right and left.

At this disturbance the Civil Guard would come out, and that would be the moment for the others to enter the jail and drag the prisoners out into the street.

Some one else said that it seemed better to him for them to approach the Civil Guards’ quarters cautiously, kill the sentinels, and take possession of the rifles.

“Decide,” said Cæsar; “I am ready for anything.”

Cæsar’s attitude made the excited ones grow calmer and understand that it was not so easy to storm the jail.

It was about eleven when the meeting at the tavern ended. They had decided to wait and see what would happen the next day, and they left the place one by one.

“We will escort you, Don Cæsar,” several of them said.

“No. What for?”

“Remember there are people who might attack you. ‘Driveller’ Juan is at large in Castro.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“That bully can’t do anything to me.”

* * * * *

_AT NIGHT_

Cæsar went out of the tavern, pulled down his hat, and wrapped himself in his cape. He had not brought the motor, to avoid being recognized. It was a cloudy night, but still and beautiful.

Before they got out of the town a small boy came up to Cæsar.

“‘The Cub-Slut’ sent me to tell you to come to her house; she wants to speak to you.”

“I will go tomorrow.”

“No. You must come now, because what she has to say is very important,” shouted the youngster.

“Well, I can’t go now.”

The youngster protested, and Cæsar continued on his way. “Limpy” and “Uncle Chinaman” followed him. Cæsar was walking in the middle of the highway, when, about half way home, a man on the run passed him. No doubt he was going to give some signal.

“Limpy” and “Chinaman” shouted over and over:

“Don Cæsar! Don Cæsar!”

Cæsar halted, and “Chinaman” and “Limpy” ran up to him.

“What’s going on?” asked Cæsar.

“They are lying in wait for you,” said “Limpy.” “Didn’t you see a man go past running?”

“Yes.”

“We are going to stay with you. We will sleep at your house,” said “Chinaman,” “and if they attack us, we will defend ourselves.”

He showed a pistol which he carried in his sash.

The three walked on together, and as they passed a little grove in front of the palace, a shadow passed by, crawling, and fled away.

“He was there,” said “Chinaman.”

They went into the house. Amparito, with the old nurse, was praying before a lighted image.

XX. CONFIDENCE

_YES, HE IS THE HERO_

When he got up, Cæsar found a lot of letters and notices from his followers all over the district, giving him pointers.

With the help of a manservant who used to go about with him, he himself got the motor ready and prepared to visit the polls.

As he got into the car, the youngster of the night before appeared with a letter.

“From ‘The Cub-Slut’; please read it right away.”

“Give it to me; I will read it.”

“She told me you were to read it right away.”

“Yes, man, yes.”

Cæsar took the letter and put it distractedly into his pocket. The motor started and Cæsar did not read the note. At eight in the morning he was on his way to Cidones. The polls had been established legally.

It was raining gently. As he drew near Cidones, the sun appeared. The river was turbid and mud-coloured. Thick grey fog-clouds were rolling about the plain; when they gathered below the hill where Cæsar stood, they gave it the appearance of an island in the middle of the sea. From the chimneys of the town the smoke came out like hanks of spun silver, and bells were ringing through this Sunday morning calm.

Cæsar stopped at an inn which was a little outside the town. The blacksmith, an old Liberal, came out to receive him. The old man had been suffering with rheumatism for some while. “How goes it?” Cæsar asked him.

“Very well. I have been to vote for you.”

“And your health?”

“Now that spring is coming, one begins to get better.”

“Yes, that is true,” said Cæsar; “I hadn’t noticed that the trees are in bloom.”

“Oh, yes, they are out. In a little while we shall have good weather. It’s a consolation for old folks.”

Cæsar took leave of the blacksmith and got into the motor.

* * * * *

_CÆSAR! CÆSAR!_

“Yes, spring is in flower,” said Cæsar. “I will remove all the obstacles and men’s strength will come to life, which is action. This town, then others, and finally all Spain.... May nothing remain hidden or closed up; everything come to life, out into the sunlight. I am a strong man; I am a man of iron; there are no obstacles for me. The forces of Nature will assist me. Cæsar! I must be Cæsar!”

The automobile began to move in a straight line toward Castro.

The ground on both sides of the highway fled away rapidly.

The automobile lessened its pace at the foot of the hill, and began to climb.

It went in by an old gate in the wall, which was called the Cart Gate.

The street of the same name, a street in the poor suburb, was narrow and the houses low; it was paved with cobbles. A little farther along several lanes formed a crossroads.

This was a quarter of brothels and of gipsies who made baskets.

When he reached the crossroads, in the narrowest part there was a cart blocking the street. The automobile stopped.

“What’s the matter?” asked Cæsar, standing up.

At that moment two shots rang out, and Cæsar fell wounded into the bottom of the car. The chauffeur saw that the discharges came from the low windows of a loom, and backing the motor, he returned rapidly, passed out the Cart Gate, at risk of running into it, went down to the highway, and drove at high speed to Cæsar’s house.

A moment later “Driveller” Juan and “Sparkler” came out of the loom and disappeared down a lane. The judge who went to take depositions learned from the chauffeur that Cæsar had received a letter as he was getting into the car. He had the wounded man’s clothes searched, and they found “The Cub-Slut’s” letter, in which she warned Cæsar of the danger he was in. Fate had kept Cæsar from reading it.

* * * * *

_THE RED FLAG_

The news that Cæsar was seriously wounded ran through the town like a train of powder.

A movement of terror shook everybody. “Limpy,” “Furibis,” and the other hysterical ones gathered at the tavern and agreed to set fire to the monastery of la Peña. “Furibis” had arms in his house and divided them among his comrades. A woman fastened a red rag to a stick, and they left Castro by different paths and met opposite Cidones.

Nine of them went armed, and various others followed behind.

On reaching Cidones, one of the party advanced up the lane and saw two pairs of Civil Guards. They discussed what they had better do, and the majority were in favour of going into Moro’s inn, which was at the entrance to the town, and waiting until night.

They did go in there and told Moro what they had just done. The inn-keeper listened with simulated approval, and brought them wine. This Moro was not a very commendable party; he had been convicted for robbery several times and had a bad reputation.

While the revolutionists were drinking and talking, Moro stole out without any one’s noticing, and went to see the chief of the Civil Guard, and told him what was going on. “They are armed, then?” asked the chief.

“Yes.”

“And how many are they?”

“Nine with arms.”

“We are only five. Do you want to do something?”

“What is it?”

“At dusk we will pass by the inn. I will knock. And you shall say to them: ‘Here is the chief of the Civil Guard; hide your arms.’ They will hide them, and we will arrest them.”

“Shall I get something for doing this favour?” asked Moro.

“Naturally.”

“What will they give me?”

“You will see.”

The ruse worked as they had plotted it; Moro played the comedy to perfection.

On learning that the chief of the Civil Guard wanted to come in, the revolutionists, on the landlord’s advice, left their arms in the next room. At the same instant the window panes burst to bits and the soldiers of the Civil Guard fired three charges from close up. Two women and four men fell dead; the wounded, among whom was “Limpy,” were taken to the hospital, and only one person was lucky enough to escape.

* * * * *

_FATE_

At the chief headquarters of Moncada’s followers, a strange phenomenon was noticed; on the preceding days they had been chock full; that night there were not over ten or a dozen men from the Workmen’s Club collected by a table lighted by a petroleum lamp. The pharmacist, Camacho, presided.

The news of the election was worse every minute. At the last hour the Padillists, knowing that Moncada was wounded, were behaving horribly. In the polls at Villamiel the tellers had fled with the blank ballots, and the Conservative boss arranged the outcome of the election from his house.

As the teller from Santa Inés, who was a poor Liberal school-master, was on his way from the hamlet with the papers, six men had seized him, had snatched the returns from him, changed all the figures, and sent them to the municipal building at Castro full of blots.

They had fired over twenty shots at the teller for Paralejo. Many of Moncada’s emissaries, on knowing that Cæsar was wounded and his campaign going badly, had passed over to the other party.

Only Moncada could have rallied that flight. His most faithful gave one another uneasy looks, hoping some one would say: “Come along!” so that they could all have gone. Camacho alone kept up the spirits of the meeting.

At nine o’clock at night the chief of police entered the headquarters, accompanied by two Civil Guards.

“Close up here, please,” said the inspector.

“Why?” asked the pharmacist.

“Because I order you to.”

“You have no right to order that.”

“No? Here, get out, everybody, and _you_ are under arrest.”

Those present took to their heels; the pharmacist went to jail to keep San Román and Ortigosa company, and the Club was shut up....

* * * * *

The election was won by Padilla.

XXI. OUR VENERABLE TRADITIONS! OUR HOLY PRINCIPLES!

The banquet in honour of Padilla was given at the Café del Comercio. All the important persons of the town, many of whom had been Cæsar’s adherents the day before, had gathered to feast the victor. The majority gorged enthusiastically, the chief of police distinguishing himself by his hearty applause. A fat lawyer presided, a greasy person with a black beard, a typical coarse, dirty, tricky Moor. Next to him sat a small attorney, pock-marked, pale of face. By dessert one no longer heard anything but cries of “Hurrah for Padilla!” among the smoke of the big cigars they were all smoking.

Then the lawyer with the black beard arose and began to orate.

He spoke slowly and with great solemnity.

“This meeting shows,” he said in a strong and sonorous voice, “your enthusiasm and your loyalty for the good cause. Never, never will we permit outsiders devoid of religion and patriotism to upset the existence of our beloved city.” (Applause.) “We will defend our venerated traditions by all the means in our power; we will not permit the hydra of anarchy to rise up in Castro; and if it should arise to attack our holy principles, we shall crush it under our heels.” (Applause.) “When men turn their backs on God, when they preach the relaxation of discipline, and licentiousness, when they are not willing to acknowledge any authority, divine or human, then it is time for decent men to form a bulwark with their breasts, for the defence of their traditions. We are, before all else, Catholics and Spaniards; and we will not consent to having Anarchists, Masons, sacrilegious persons get the mastery of this sacred soil, and wipe out its memories, and spot the most holy rights of our mother, the Church.” (Ovation.)

“Hurrah for Jesus Christ and His Immaculate Church!” shouted a priest, a bit upset by his wine, in a raucous voice.

Next, the fat, greasy lawyer paraded all the glories of Spain, with their appropriate adjectives: the Cid, Columbus, Isabella the Catholic, the Great Captain, Hernán Cortés.... Then a couple of dozen orators spoke, and the meeting ended very late at night.

CASTRO DURO TODAY

Today Castro Duro has definitely abandoned her intentions of living, and return to order, as the weekly Conservative paper says; the fountains have dried, the school been closed, the little trees in Moncada Park have been pulled up. The people emigrate every year by hundreds. Today a mill shuts down, tomorrow a house falls in; but Castro Duro continues to live with her venerated traditions and her holy principles, not permitting outsiders devoid of religion and patriotism to disturb her existence, not spotting the most holy rights of the Church, our mother; enveloped in dust, in dirt, and in filth, asleep in the sun, in the midst of her grainless fields.

XXII. FINIS GLORIÆ MUNDI. _FROM A SOCIETY COLUMN_

To be in Castro Duro and not visit Don Cæsar Moncada’s house is a veritable crime of _lèse-art_. Señor Moncada, who is a most intelligent person, has gathered in his aristocratic residence a collection of precious things, old pictures, antiques, sculptures of the XV and XVI Centuries, badges of the Inquisition. Señor Moneada has made a conscientious study of the primitive Castilian painters, and is certainly the person most at home in that line.

His most beautiful wife, who is also a distinguished artist, has aided him in forming this collection, and they have both gone about by automobile through all the towns in this province and the neighbouring ones, collecting everything artistic they found.

At Don Cæsar’s house we had the pleasure of greeting the learned Franciscan Father Martin, to whom the population of Castro Duro owes so much.

At a halt in the conversation we asked Señor Moncada:

“And you, Don Cæsar, have no idea of going back into politics?”

And he answered us, smiling:

“No, no. What for? I am nothing, nothing.”

THE END