Chapter 5

As he spoke, slowly, his stern spirit caught fire. His cheeks grew pale, and in his jacket pockets his fists knotted. Manolo's savage blood began to boil, as well.

"Don't make me say anything, you!" he flung at his father.

He turned as if to walk away. His voice, his gesture, the scornful shrug of his shoulders, with which he seemed to underscore his words, all were those of a ruffian and a bully. Anybody would have said that the tough, swaggering silversmith lived again, in him. Zureda controlled his anger, and began once more:

"If you want to fight, you'll be a fool to wait till to-morrow. I'm ready for it, now."

"Crazy, you?" demanded the youth.

"No!"

"Well, you act it!"

"You're wrong. I know all about _you_--I know you've been beating your mother. And you can't pay for a thing like that even with every drop of your blood. No, sir! Not even the last drop of pig's blood you've got in your body would pay for that!"

Amadeo Zureda was afraid of himself. He had begun to shiver. All the hate that, long ago, had flung him upon Berlanga, now had burst forth again in a fresh, strong, overwhelming torrent.

Suddenly Manolo stepped up to his father and seized him by the lapel.

"You going to shut up?" he snarled, in rage. "Or are you bound to drive me to it?"

Zureda's answer was a smash in the face. Then the two men fell upon each other, first with their fists, presently with knives. At that moment the old man saw in the face of the man he had believed his son, the same expression of hate that twenty years ago had distorted the features of Manolo Berlanga. Those eyes, that mouth all twisted into a grimace of ferocity, that slim and feline body now trembling with rage, all were like the silversmith's. The look of the father came back again in that of the son, as exactly as if both faces had been poured in the same mold.

And for the first time, after so long a time, the old engineer clearly understood everything.

Annihilated by the realization of this new disaster, no longer having any heart to defend himself, the wretched man let his arms fall. And just at this moment Manolo, beside himself with rage, plunged the fatal blade into his breast.

Now with his vengeance complete, the parricide took to flight.

Amadeo Zureda, dying, was carried to the hospital. There, that same night, Don Adolfo came to see him. The good neighbor's grief was terrible, even to the point of the grotesque.

"Is it true, what people are saying?" he asked, weeping. "Is it true?"

The wounded man had hardly strength enough to press his hand a very little.

"Good-by, Adolfo," he stammered. "Now I know what I--had to know. You told me, but I--couldn't believe it. But now I know you--were right. Manolo was not--my son----"

* * * * *

THE NECKLACE

The first act was finished. Enrique Darlés went down to the foyer. His provincial curiosity drew him thither. He felt an eagerness to absorb the vast, motley spirit of the city. He wanted to behold many things, to school himself, strengthen himself with all these new impressions. Above all he wanted to feel the life-currents of Madrid beating about his migratory feet.

A few minutes before he had been sitting up there in the "peanut gallery" of the Teatro Real. And from that vulgar place he had beheld the theater with its vast ranges of seats and its boxes all drenched under the blinding dazzle of hundreds of electric lights. The theater had looked to him like some rare and beautiful garden; or maybe it had been a kind of gigantic nosegay, where the sparkling diamonds on women's throats had seemed dew-drops caught on great silk petals, on glossy velvets, on white, bare shoulders.

So entirely absorbed had he been in this spectacle that he had hardly paid any attention at all to what the orchestra and the actors had been about. Every other emotion had been shut from his soul by these dazzling sight-impressions, that had never wearied him. The wonderful, human garden spread out below him had exhaled rare perfumes. A sensual and soporific kind of vapor had risen all about him--an incense blent of the odors of new-mown hay, of jasmine, musk and Parmesan violets, of daintily-bathed women's flesh, of wonderful lingerie. And he had studied all this luminous picture, resplendent as the climax of a brilliant play. Above all he had studied the women, with their sensuous bodies; their unashamed bosoms that had been the targets of analytical eagerness through many opera-glasses; their gay and laughing faces, whereof the beauty had been enhanced by the placid security of wealth. He had observed their deftly combed and curled little heads, their jewel-laden hands--hands that had waved big feather-fans to and fro over the gauzy stuff of their gowns.

Enrique wanted to see all this wonderful world at close range, so he went down to the foyer. And there he stopped, just a bit ashamed of himself. For the first time he was beginning to realize that his out-of-date slouch hat, his skimpy black suit that made him look like a high-school boy, and his old boots that needed a shine were greatly out of place. He felt that his flowing necktie, which he had tried to knot up with student-like carelessness, was just as ugly as all the rest of him. Correctly dressed men were passing all about him, with elegant frock-coats that bore flowers in their buttonholes and with impeccable Tuxedos. Women were regally trailing grosgrain and watered-silk skirts over the soft, red carpet. It all seemed a majestic symphony of silks, brocades and splendid furs, of wonderful ankles glimpsed through the perverse mystery of open-work stockings, of fascinating adornments, of bracelets whose bangles tinkled their golden song on the ermine whiteness of soft arms.

Abashed, feeling himself wholly out of place, young Darlés self-consciously strolled over to look at a bust of Gayarre--a bronze bust that showed the man with short, up-tossed hair. Its energy made one think of Othello. Quite at once, a hand dropped familiarly on Darlés' shoulder. The young man turned.

"Don Manuel! You? What a surprise!"

Don Manuel was a man of middle height, thick-set and just a trifle bald. He looked about fifty. A heavy, curling red beard covered his full-blooded, fleshy, prosperous cheeks and chin. He wore evening-dress. His short, thick, epicurean nose supported gold-bowed spectacles.

"Well, my boy," he exclaimed. "You, here?"

Enrique blushed violently, without exactly understanding why, as he answered:

"Yes, I came to--to see----"

Hardly knowing what he was about, he took off his hat, with that respect we learn even as children, when confronted by our parents' friends. Now he stood there, holding the hat with both hands across his breast. Don Manuel, you know, was a deputy in the National Assembly. The great man made Enrique put his hat on, again.

"What are you doing in Madrid?" asked he.

"Studying."

"Law?"

"No, sir. Medicine."

"That's a first-rate profession. What year are you in?"

"Freshman," answered Darlés, and smiled in a shamefaced sort of way. He knew his answers were short and clumsy, and the feeling of shabbiness oppressed him more than ever. Don Manuel glanced about him, with a kind of arrogant ease. Two or three times he murmured: "I'm waiting for somebody." Then he began to talk to the student again, asking him about his father and the political boss of the home town. Darlés kept on answering every question just the same way:

"No change, down there. Everything's all right."

And again the conversation was broken off by Don Manuel's expectant glancing about for the friend he was to meet.

The deputy asked, after a minute or two:

"You're living in a boarding-house, aren't you?"

"No, sir."

"Where, then?"

"In Calle Ballesta. I've rented a little inside room, on the fourth floor. It costs me thirteen pesetas a month, and I eat at a little tavern on the same street."

"I see you know how to rub along. You can save money, if you're willing to fight with landladies. After you've got thoroughly used to Madrid, nothing can make you ever go back home. Madrid is wonderful! With money, a clever man can have all kinds of amusement here."

Don Manuel added, using that confidential air with which fools and parvenus try to impress people they think beneath them:

"See here! You're not a boy, any more. And I--hang it all!--you can't call me old, yet. I don't see my friend showing up, anywhere, so we can have a little talk. I've got--I've got something bothering me. You understand?"

Enrique nodded.

"You know her? Alicia Pardo?"

"No, sir."

"She's very popular, in the gay set. A beauty! At the Casino we call her 'Little Goldie'."

His whole expression suddenly changed. His eyes began to gleam, with joyful gluttony. The congested redness of his cheeks grew deeper, and he turned round, stroking his beard and straightening up his top-hat with the vanity of a fool who thinks people are admiring him.

The long, sharp trilling of electric bells announced that the second act was about to begin. Everybody began crowding back into the theater; and now, in the solitude of the foyer, the bust of Gayarre seemed higher. Don Manuel exclaimed:

"Come along with me. I'll introduce you to Alicia."

Don Manuel noticed the student's dismayed look, and added:

"That's all right about your not having a dress-suit on. You can stay in the rear of the box."

He started off with a firm step, trying to assume the ease and grace of youth. Enrique followed him without a word. He felt both happy and afraid.

They reached the outer box, that Don Manuel judged good enough for the young fellow. The deputy murmured:

"This is all right, isn't it? I'll see you later. You can see everything here."

Enrique made no answer. The play was already going on, and in the religious stillness of the theater the chorus of the piece was rising in triumphal harmony. It was one of those pleasant Italian operas, freighted for all of us with memories of youth. Darlés ventured to raise one of the heavy curtains just a little, that shut the outer box off from the inner one. A young woman was sitting there, with her back to him and her elbows on the railing of the box. She was all in white. He could see the tempting outlines of her firm hips, beneath the childish insufficiency of her girdle. Her shoulders were plump and of flawless perfection. On the snow of her bare neck her blonde hair, tinged with red, shadowed tawny reflections. Two splendid emeralds trembled, green as drops of absinthe, in the rosy lobes of her small, fine ears.

Don Manuel was beside her. Darlés noted that Alicia and the deputy had very little to say to each other. Suddenly she turned her head with an inquisitive air, graceful and fascinating; and the student received full in the eyes the shock of two large, green, luminous pupils--living emeralds, indeed. Her scrutiny of him was short, searching and curious; it changed to an expression of scorn.

Darlés flushed red and began to tremble. He let the curtain fall, and took refuge at the rear of the outer box. His first impulse was to escape; but presently he changed his mind, for it seemed to him more than a little rude to take French leave. The student thought he was bored, but in reality he was afraid. In spite of his agitation, he waited. And bit by bit the magic spell of the opera took possession of him and freed him from embarrassment.

The piece now going on was one of those romantic, wholly lyric poems in which the actors are everything. The environment about them, the sense of objectivity, played no rôle. The 'cellos, sighing with lassitude and pity, lamented in gentle accord; the violins cut through the harmony with sharp cries of rebellion and gay arpeggios. And the voice of the tenor rose above that many-toned, protean, orchestrated poem with warm persuasion, wailing into inconsolable laments.

Enrique got up again, and once more timidly drew apart the curtains of the outer box. Nobody noticed him. Alicia still sat there with her back toward him, transfixed by the fairy magic of the opera. Her emotions seemed almost to transpire through the white skin of her back and shoulders. Enrique Darlés once more began to tremble. His ideas grew fantastic. When he had seen the young woman's eyes, they had appeared two emeralds; and now the emeralds twinkling beneath the blaze of her hair seemed to be looking at him like two pupils. But this absurdity soon faded from his mind. The orchestra was languorously beginning a _ritornelle_; and all through the main motif independent musical phrases were strung like beads. These slid into chromatics, rising, beating up to lose themselves in one vast chord of agony supreme. And, in that huge lamentation, there mingled depths of disillusion, whispers of hope, desires and wearinesses, laughter and grimaces--the whole of life, indeed, seemed blent there, swift-passing, tragic, knotted in the bitterness of everything that ever has been and that still must be.

Enrique sat down again. Nameless suffering clutched his throat, so that he felt a profound desire for tears. Like a motion-picture film, both past and present flashed across his vision in swift flight. His poor, old father and the little chemist's shop at home appeared before him--the miserable shop that hardly eked out a penurious living for the old man. Then he saw himself, as soon as his studies should be finished, condemned to go back to that hateful, monotonous little town. There he would labor to pay back his parents everything they had given him; and there all his years of youth, all his love-illusions, all his artistic inspirations would soon fade. There he must bury all the finest of his soul. Then, no doubt, he would marry and have children; and then--well, life would stretch out into a long, straight line, unwavering, with never any depths or heights, lost in the monotony of a blank desert. What could be more terrible than to know just what we are destined to be in ten years, in twenty years, in thirty?

The poor student tugged at his hair, in desperation, and tears blurred his sight. How he would have loved to be rich, to have no family, to be the sport of the unforeseen! For is not the unforeseen pregnant with all the vicissitudes of poetry? He felt the blood of conquerors pulsing in his arteries, the energies of bold adventurers who dare brave perils and emprise, and leave their bones on far-off shores. This fighting strain, this crave for danger, filled him with boundless melancholy as he reflected that he must live on, on to old age, and do no differently than all other men do, year by year. Destiny meant for him no more than this: to follow a costly, hard and tedious career merely that he might make a pittance, get a wife and find some hole or corner to live in--some poor, mean little house in a world of palaces, some commonplace love in a world throbbing with so many passions, some paltry dole in a world crowded with so many fortunes!

Whipped by the music, the foolish grief of Enrique Darlés broke into sobs.

Now the second act was done, and Don Manuel and Alicia came into the outer box. The young woman's eyes--green, eloquent eyes--filled with astonishment.

"What?" she asked. "You're crying?"

Before the student could answer, she turned to her companion and said:

"What do you think about that, now? He's been crying!"

In shame, Enrique answered:

"I don't know. I--I'm upset. But--yes, maybe----"

She smiled, and asked:

"You've got a sweetheart, haven't you?"

"No, no, Señorita."

"Well then, why----?"

"It's all foolishness, I know, but every time I hear music--even bad music--it makes me sad."

"That's funny! _I_ don't feel that way!"

The red-faced, thick-set Don Manuel shrugged his square shoulders as much as to say it mattered nothing, and introduced them to each other. Enrique's feverish hand held for a moment the cool, soft hand--snow and velvet--of Little Goldie. Then all three sat down on the same divan, Alicia between the two men. Don Manuel drew out his cigar-case.

"Smoke?" asked he.

"No, thanks."

"Good boy!" exclaimed the deputy. "You haven't any vices, have you?"

"What?" asked Alicia. "You don't smoke?"

"No, Señorita."

"How funny you are! Well, _I_ do!"

Enrique blushed again, and looked down. He saw quite clearly that this little detail made the beggarliness of his clothes even more noticeable. Women always seem to like a man to smoke. Tobacco is their best perfume. The student felt furious at himself. To regain countenance before this girl he would gladly have consumed all the Egyptian or Turkish cigarettes in Don Manuel's case. But it was too late, now. Opportunity was gone; opportunity, that master-magic which endues everything with grace and worth.

The young woman's self-possession was quite English in its cool perfection as she lighted up and fell to smoking, with one leg crossed over the other. She leaned her shoulders against the dun-hued back of the divan. And now, all about her diabolical, reddish-gold hair, the cigarette-smoke mounted thinly on the quiet air, and wove blue veils. Darlés observed her, from the corner of his eye. Her face was aquiline, with wide nostrils, with a little blood-red, cruel mouth and a low forehead that gave the impression of hard, instinctive selfishness. Her big, greenish eyes peered out with boredom and command. Her whole expression was cold, keen, probing, pitiless.

A string of seed-pearls girdled her soft, rosy throat. Her fingers blazed with the fire of her rings. Her nails were sharp as claws. In the well-harmonized rhythms of her every attitude, in all her perfect modelings, in every nuance and detail of her--wonderful plaything for men's dalliance--Enrique, untutored country boy though he was, discerned a supremely selfish ego. He realized this woman was one of those emotionless creatures of willfulness, wholly self-centered, who are incapable of sorrow.

Don Manuel's mood was brusque, with that brusquerie of a rich, healthy man who has a pretty woman in tow, as he exclaimed:

"Well now, Enrique, how do you like my Little Goldie? I bet you never saw anything like her, back home!" Triumphantly he added: "She doesn't cost much, either. When I first met her, I asked: 'What shall I give you?' She answered: 'A box at the Teatro Real.' Why, that's a bagatelle! Only a little more than thirteen hundred pesetas for fourteen plays. And here we are. I tell you the little lady doesn't ask much."

Darlés answered nothing. His emotions choked him--the novelty of this new world that till now he had not even known by hearsay; a topsy-turvy, unmoral world where, as in art, beauty formed the only criterion of worth; a world where women sold themselves for an opera-box.

All this time Alicia Pardo had been studying Enrique. The downright frankness of her look was alarming in its amusement. Enrique's extreme youth; the simplicity of his answers; the Apollo-like perfection of his features; the obsidian hue of his wavy hair which marked him as from the south of Spain; the black ardor of eyes, that in their eager curiosity contrasted with the boyish smoothness of his face; yes, even his proneness to blush, had all greatly interested her. Above all, Alicia found her attention wakened by the artistic spirit in him, which had wept at the sound of the music. Alicia had never seen men weep except through jealousy, or through some other even baser and more ignoble emotion. Therefore in the tears of this boy she discovered something wonderful and great.

And through her little head, all filled with curious whims, the idea drifted that it would be passing strange and sweet to let herself be loved by such a boy. Suddenly she exclaimed:

"What are _you_ doing in Madrid?"

"I'm studying."

"Ah, indeed? A student, eh? I read a novel, a while ago, that I liked very much indeed. The hero was a student. Quite a coincidence, eh?"

Darlés nodded "Yes." The childish simplicity of the remark amazed him. Goldie went on:

"How old are you?"

"Twenty."

"Honest and true?"

"Fact! Why? Maybe I look older?"

"No, you don't. Younger, I think. I'm not quite nineteen, but _I_ do look older."

Don Manuel had opened a newspaper, and was reading the latest market quotations. Alicia felt a desire to know the boy's name. She asked him what it was.

"Enrique?" she repeated. "That's a pretty name. Very!"

Then she grew silent a while, remembering all the Enriques she had ever known--and there had been plenty of them. She recalled they'd all been nice. Thus, reviewing her life-history, she reached her childish years; quiet years of peace, lived in the Virgilian simplicity of the country. And she seemed to see in this boy, innocent, healthy and sun-browned, something of what she herself had been.

Quite beside himself with new emotions, ecstatic and open-mouthed, the student looked at her, too, like a man studying some unusually beautiful work of art.

Now many footfalls echoed in the corridors again and bells began to ring. A flood of spectators began to fill up the seats. The third act was going to begin. Alicia and Don Manuel got up.

"Going to stay?" the deputy asked Darlés.

"No, thanks."

"Why not?"

"Because--well, I've got to go to bed early. To-morrow I'm going to get up early."

He felt so sure that Alicia might be able to love him, and so overpowered by the happy embarrassment of this thought, that he wanted to be alone, to enjoy it more fully. Don Manuel added:

"Well, suit yourself. Any time you want to see me, don't go to my house. I'm never there. Better go to Alicia's. You'll find me there every evening, from six to eight."

They took leave of each other. Enrique turned his head, as he left the box, and his eyes met the girl's. Their look was a meeting of caresses, as if they had given each other a kiss and made a rendezvous. It was one of those terrible looks, capable of changing the whole current of a man's life--a look such as a man will sometimes receive in his youth, only to find it hounding and pursuing him his whole life long.

II

Next day, Alicia spent the evening before her fireplace, with a book. Don Manuel's visit to her had ended in a quarrel, and he had gone. A great nervousness possessed the girl; she wanted to cry, to yawn, to pull out her hair, to kick the little cabinets from behind whose crystal panes all kinds of little figurines, porcelain dolls and extravagant bibelots peeped out with roguish faces.

No one who has never been really bored can grasp the complete horror, the abysmal blackness, the silence like that of a bottomless pit or an endless tunnel, which lies in absolute boredom. Still, just as death is the beginning of life, so at times tedium can become a spring of vigorous action. Many men have sown wild oats in their youth till they have tired of them, and have in riper years become model husbands, applied themselves to business and died leaving millions. Boredom sometimes turns out works of art. Had not Heine and Byron been monumentally bored, they could never have risen to the heights of song.

Now, though Alicia Pardo was very young, she already suffered from this malady--the malady of quietude which rubs out boundary-lines and extinguishes contrasts. Never yet had she been in love. The selfishness of her lovers had in the end endowed her soul--itself little inclined to tenderness--with all the hardness of a diamond.

"I can't love any one," she often said. "I've made a regular man of myself."