Chapter 7

She attached no importance whatever to the caprice that had momentarily thrown her into the student's arms. The evening before their first and only night together, Darlés had just happened to find her in one of those fits of the blues, of eclectic relaxation, in which the volatile feminine sense of ethics swings equidistant from good and evil. Her virtues and her vices, alike, were arbitrary and without any exact motive. If the student had perhaps had finer eyes, she would have yielded to him, just the same; then too, perhaps if the emerald necklace that, just a few minutes before, she and Don Manuel had been quarreling about had been less desirable, she would have refused him.

The only certain thing about it all was this, that she had accepted the student's comradeship because in a kind of good-natured way she had reckoned the conversation of even a poor man more entertaining than the remembrance of a necklace. And next morning when she had got back home, she had found herself a little surprised at her own conduct. She felt that she had shown a generosity, a fanciful whim such as perhaps might have driven a critic like Sarcey, after forty years of the real theater, to some miserable little puppet-show. At all events the thing should never happen again. It was absurd!

Next day, Teodora had informed her that Darlés had come to see her while she had been out. Day after day, the same thing had occurred. The girl had ended up by feeling very much annoyed at the young fellow's sad obstinacy. A veritable beggar for love, he had come to trouble the easy currents of her idleness. Every time Teodora had told her the student had been back again, Alicia had grown angry.

"What the devil does he want, anyhow?" she would exclaim. "Blest if _I_ know!"

In this she was really sincere. She did not know. The selfish frivolity of her disposition could not understand how any man, after having received the supreme gift from a woman, could do other than get tired of her. Darlés' note, complaining of her desertion of him, increased her annoyance. Once for all she felt she must cut this entanglement. What better way could there be than to receive the importunate young fellow and talk to him in a perfectly impersonal way, as if no secret existed between them?

When Darlés arrived, next day, at the usual time, Teodora led him into the dining-room.

"I'll tell mistress you're here," said she.

Darlés remained standing there, reflective, one elbow leaning against the window-jamb. Once, when he had been nothing but "Don Manuel's friend," Alicia had used to receive him informally. Nobody had announced him, then. Now he felt himself isolated, stifled by that kind of friendly hostility used on boresome callers. The maid came back and said:

"Mistress will see you. Come this way."

Darlés found the girl in her little boudoir, together with a tall, dark-haired girl, dressed in gray. This girl wore English-looking, mannish clothes, well set off by her red tie and by the whiteness of her starched collar and cuffs. When Alicia saw the student, she neither moved nor stretched out her hand to him. All she said was:

"Hello, there! Is that you?"

Something in the rather scornful familiarity of her greeting infinitely humbled him. He grew pale. All the blood in his body seemed flooding his heart, turning to ice there. Still discourteous, Alicia introduced him to the other girl:

"Señor Darlés--my friend, Candelas."

Candelas fixed her keen, vivid eyes on the new-comer. Then she peered at Alicia, as if asking whether this visit might not perhaps veil some amorous secret. The girl understood, and gave her friend's sophisticated question a vertical answer:

"No, you're wrong. Enrique comes here only because he's Don Manuel's friend."

The student nodded assent to this, and Candelas smiled coldly. Then the two girls once more took up the thread of the conversation broken by the arrival of Darlés. The poor fellow sensed that he was isolated and dismissed. Five, ten, fifteen minutes passed, with no break in that animated chatter. Men's names came into it; and Candelas laughed heartily as she reviewed the details of a recent supper she had had. Alicia laughed, too. Quite possibly she did this to hurt the student's feelings and to persuade herself Enrique really was nothing more to her than just Don Manuel's friend.

A visitor dropped in; an old woman who dealt in clothes and trinkets. She had a heavy bundle with her, and this she put down on the floor. Alicia asked her:

"Well, Clotilde, what's new?"

Clotilde fairly oozed enjoyment, in her thick cloak, as she answered:

"I've got the finest petticoats and stockings in the world."

"High-priced?"

"Dirt cheap! I don't know why, but I've got it into my head you want to spend a little money, to-day."

Then the furnishings of the little boudoir vanished under a many-colored flood of showy silks--green, brown, blue--which, as they were spread out, diffused a most delightful perfume of cleanness. As if under some magic spell, Alicia and Candelas fell a prey to the intense, acquisitive passion that tortures women in front of shop-windows. The two girls vied in asking the price of every treasure.

"This petticoat here, how much?"

"Seeing it's you, a hundred pesetas."

"And that heliotrope one?"

"Seventy-five. Just take a good look at it. Wonderful!"

With amazement, Enrique studied this profusion of elegance and luxury. He had never even dreamed civilization wove so many refinements about the art of love. And as his frank eyes observed these petticoats that gently rustled, or took in the lace of these night-dresses--majestically full as senatorial togas--he sadly recalled the poor little white chemises and coarse underwear lacking in all adornment, that the women of his home-town hung out to dry on their clothes-lines.

Now a new detail came to increase his misery. The peddler and Alicia were arguing excitedly over the price of the heliotrope petticoat. Clotilde wanted seventy-five pesetas, and the young woman vowed she couldn't go over fifty. The peddler insisted:

"You'd better make up your mind to take it, because you won't get such a bargain anywhere else. I'm only selling it at this price just to please you, but I'm not making a penny on the deal."

Then she turned to Enrique, and added:

"Come now, this gentleman will buy it for you!"

Darlés blushed, and found nothing to say. Men without money are contemptible; and as Alicia did not even deign to look at him, the student knew he had lost her. Dear Lord, if there had only been some devil's bank where lovers might barter off the years of their life, for money, gladly would he have sold his whole existence for those curséd seventy-five pesetas!

Tired of arguing, the peddler gathered up her things and packed them into her valise. The conversation drifted off to other things. The women began talking about jewels. Candelas showed a brooch that had been given her. Clotilde offered the girls a necklace.

"If you'd like to see it, I'll bring it," said she. "I've got it at home."

Alicia sighed deeply; and that long sigh, broken like a child's, expressed enormous grief. She said:

"I'm in love with a necklace in a shop on Calle Mayor, and I don't want any other. I dream about it all the time. I never saw anything so wonderful! I tell you the man who gives me _that_, can have me."

"How much is it?"

"Fifteen thousand pesetas."

Then she fixed an inscrutable look on Darlés, and added:

"I think this gentleman here is going to get it for me. Aren't you, Enrique?"

Candelas was about to laugh, but checked herself. Her penetrating eyes had just seen in the student's congested face something of the terrific inner struggle now possessing him. Darlés was no longer able to contain himself. He got up to leave, and his eyes showed such despair and shame that Alicia took pity on him.

"I'll see you out," said she.

They left the little boudoir. When they got to the parlor, the student--who hardly knew what he was doing--seized the girl's hands and covered them with kisses. He began to weep desperately.

"Alicia! Alicia!" he stammered, "what makes you so cruel to me? I'm dying for you! Alicia! Oh, why can't you love me?"

But she had already recovered from her brief emotion, and now tried to rid herself of him.

"Come, come, now," she exclaimed, "what a fool you are!"

"I adore you, Alicia! Heart of my soul!"

"Come now, be good! Keep quiet--good-by! You're getting me into trouble!"

"But I've got to see you--see you!"

"All right! Only _do_ keep quiet! Good-by--keep quiet, I tell you! Candelas might get wise to something, and I don't want her making fun of us!"

She spoke in a low tone, and at the same time kept pushing Darlés toward the door. He murmured:

"Are you sending me away forever?"

"No."

"Yes, you are, too! You're trying to get rid of me!"

"No, no; but for heaven's sake, get out!"

"Yes, you are; you're throwing me out--getting rid of me because I'm poor, because I don't know how to win you! But how _can_ I win you, if you won't give me a little time?"

She was growing angry; her face became hard. The student clasped his hands and cried:

"You're doing a wicked thing to send me away like this!"

"All right, all right----"

"A wicked thing, because any man that loves as much as I do can do anything. Even if I _am_ poor, some time I might be rich. Even if I _am_ obscure, I might become a noted artist, if you wanted me to. I'd kill, I'd steal for you!"

"For heaven's sake, shut up and get out!"

"Yes, I'll go because you tell me to. But--hero or thief--I'd be anything to stay with you, anything for you! Alicia, oh, my Alicia, I'll do anything you want me to--yes, by God, if I get twenty years for it!"

The poor, innocent young chap, without suspecting it, was uttering a great phrase; he was laying all his youth at the feet of this ungrateful woman--offering her the same treasure of youth to gain which Faust lost his soul.

Alicia already had the door open.

"Good-by," she whispered. "Do get out! Manuel might come!"

"When am I going to see you again?"

"Oh, some time."

"When?"

"I don't know. _Won't_ you go?"

"To-morrow?"

"No."

"Tell me! Tell me what day! I'll be patient. I'll wait. When can I see you?"

She hesitated. Ardently he insisted:

"When?"

"Oh, you make me sick!"

"Come, have it over with. Tell me, when?"

A look of perdition, of madness, gleamed in the green eyes of the Magdalene. This look seemed to illuminate her whole face, to change into a smile on the tyrannical line of her lips.

"When?" he repeated.

Without knowing why, the student was afraid; but almost at once he gathered himself together.

"Tell me, tell me, when?" he stammered.

"I don't know."

"You've got to tell me!"

"You're crazy!"

"No matter, tell me, when?"

Insidiously she replied:

"Never. Or--when you bring me the necklace I asked you for!"

Struck dumb, he peered at her, because he realized the girl meant what she said. She added:

"Then----"

The door closed. Enrique Darlés blundered, weeping, down the staircase.

IV

Darlés got up next morning very early and went wandering out into the street. He was completely done up. The night had been one of terror and insomnia; and when day had dawned, finding him in his miserable little room--a room whose only furniture was a bureau covered with books and magazines, a rickety pine table and a few rush-bottomed chairs, all mean and old--the realization of his solitude had struck him with the violence of a blow. He had felt that profound agitation which psychologists call "claustrophobia," or the fear of enclosed spaces.

For a long time he wandered about, absorbed in vacillations that had neither name nor plan. He hardly knew himself. His conscience had been cruelly wrung in a few hours of suffering; and from this savage convulsion of the soul unsuspected developments were emerging, enormous moral unfoldings, filled with terrifying perplexities. His despair had loosed a stupendous avalanche of problems against the bulwark of those moral principles which had been taught him as a child. And each of these questions was now a terrible problem for him. Where, he wondered, does virtue end? Where does sin commence? And if all our natural forces should go straight toward the goal of happiness, why should there be any desires that codes of formulated ethics should judge depraved and sinful? Why should not everything which pleases be allowed?

When he reached the Calle de Atocha, he met a friend of his, called Pascual Cañamares. This friend was a medical student like himself. The two young fellows greeted each other. Cañamares was on his way to San Carlos.

"Do you want to come along with me?" he asked. "I'll show you the dissecting-room."

Darlés went along with his friend. Cañamares noticed Enrique's pallor.

"You don't look a bit well this morning," said he.

"No, I didn't sleep much last night."

"Maybe you were out having a good time?"

"No. On the contrary, I cried all night."

There was such a depth of manly pain in this reply that Cañamares did not dare probe the matter any further.

The dissecting-room, cold and white, produced some very lively sensations in Darlés. Floods of sunlight fell from the tall windows, painting a wide, golden border over the tiled walls. A good many corpses lay on the marble tables, covered with blood-stained sheets; and all these bodies had shaven heads and open mouths. Their naked feet, closely joined together, produced a ghastly sensation of quietude. An indefinable odor floated in the air, a nauseating odor of dead flesh. Darlés felt a slight vertigo which forced him to close his eyes and leave the room. For more than an hour he wandered about the gravely-echoing, spacious cloisters of San Carlos. A strange sadness hovered over the building; the damp, old building which once on a time had been a convent and now had become a school--the building where the vast tedium of a science unable to free life from pain was added to the profound melancholy of a religion which thinks only of death.

When Pascual Cañamares left his classroom, he asked Darlés to go and dine with him. Enrique accepted. It was just noon. Cañamares usually ate at a little tavern in the Plaza de Anton Martín. This was a gay little establishment, with high wooden counters, painted red. The two students sat down before a table, on which the hostess had spread a little tablecloth.

"Well, what do you want?" asked Cañamares.

"Oh, I don't care. Anything you do."

"Soup and stew?"

"All right."

Cañamares ordered, in a free and easy way:

"Landlady! Bring us a stew!"

He was a big, young fellow, twenty, plump and full-blooded, vivacious with that healthy, turbulent kind of joviality which seems to diffuse vital energies all about it. He was very talkative; and in his picturesque and frivolous chatter lay a contagious good-humor. Darlés answered him only with distrait monosyllables. His whole attention was fixed on a few coachmen at the next table. They were talking about a certain crime that had been committed that morning. Two men, in love with the same woman, had fought for her with knives, and one had killed the other. The murderer had been captured. It was a vulgar but intense crime of passion; it seemed to have a certain barbarous charm which, in its own way, was chivalric, since there had been no foul play in the crime. The fight had been fair and open. And the student admired, he even envied those two brave men who, for the sake of love, had not shrunk before the solemnity of a moment in which the death-dealing wound coincides with the knife-thrust which carries a man off to the penitentiary.

As they left the tavern, Pascual took unceremonious leave of his companion.

"I'm going to leave you," said he, "because no one can have any fun with you. Hanged if I know what's the matter with you, to-day! Why, you won't even listen to a fellow!"

Then he took his leave. Unmoved, Enrique saw him walk away; but after that he felt a painful sensation of loneliness. Yes, and this loneliness had come upon him because he had been frank enough not to hide his ugly state of mind, because he had let all the melancholy of his soul shine forth freely from his eyes. And in that moment he understood that to be thoroughly sincere is tremendously expensive, for all sincerity--even the most innocent--invariably exacts a heavy price.

That evening he ate only a very light supper and went to bed early. He lay awake a long time, tortured by a flood of disconnected memories. His father, who represented all his past, and Alicia Pardo, who symbolized his whole present, seemed to be striving for him. The image of the girl at last prevailed.

Little by little he fell to studying the perverse and mocking spirit of the woman, who, even when she had waked up in the morning with him, had looked at him and shrugged her shoulders disdainfully. Well, what had happened? Between them, where had the fault lain? Was the girl naturally a hard-hearted creature, incapable of high and lasting sentiments; or was it that he, himself, quiet and peaceful, had not been able to live up to her illusions?

Scourged by the agonizing tyranny of his will, the student's memory recalled moments, evoked phrases, and once more endowed with new reality all the details of that enchanted night in which it had seemed to him all Madrid had been perfumed with violets. And as the human heart always yearns to forgive the object of our love, Enrique succeeded at last, after much reflection, in convincing himself that Alicia was innocent.

He decided that from the first moment she had been blameless. She had encouraged him to undertake the conquest of her; and afterward completely and with no other wish than to see him happy she had opened her arms to him--Venus-like arms, which had cast about his neck a bond of pity and sweet tenderness. And he, in exchange for such supreme happiness, what had he given?

Accusingly an implacable voice began to cry out in the student's conscience. Alicia, he pondered, was accustomed to the ways of the world; she was a woman of exacting and refined tastes, who adored luxury and understood Beethoven. Many men of the aristocracy worshiped her, making a fashionable cult of her beauty; and more than one famous tenor had sung for her, alone in the intimacy of her bedroom, his favorite _racconto_. The inexorable voice continued:

"And what have you done, Darlés the Obscure, to be worthy of this treasure? What merits have you had? Women of such complete beauty as hers seek that which excels--they love strength, which is the supreme beauty of man; strength, which is glory in the artist, money in the millionaire, elegance and breeding in the man of the world, despair in the suicide, courage and outlawry in the thief who boldly dares defy the law. But you, you who are nothing, what do you aspire to? Of what can you complain?"

The student heaved a sigh, and his eyes filled with tears. He was a fool, a shrinking coward, a poltroon. A man who has ruined himself for a woman, or who, to keep her as his own, has committed murder and been sent to prison, may justly complain of her. But _he_, quite on the contrary----

Suddenly Darlés shuddered so violently that the electric shock of his nerves made him utter a cry. Deathly pale, he sat up in bed. Since he could not give Alicia either a fortune or the glory of a great artist, he must drink a toast to her with his whole honor--he must steal. This came to him as a terrible revelation, resonant of Hell. And all at once he understood the enigmatic expression which had shone in the eyes of the girl and had sounded from her lips the last time they had talked together. He had asked her: "When am I going to see you again?" And she had answered: "Never--until you bring me the necklace I have asked you for!"

Now these mystic words clearly reëchoed in his mind; now he fully understood them. Alicia was in love with a priceless jewel; and often, thinking about it, she grew very sad. Her sadness was real; he himself had seen it. Perhaps the girl, when she had dismissed him, reminding him of that necklace, had spoken in jest; perhaps it had been in earnest. Who could tell? At all events, when she had declared that they would never see each other again, she had in a veiled manner expressed her belief that he was a coward, incapable of ruining himself for her.

The feverish eyes of Enrique Darlés burned like coals. Why, indeed, should he not steal? Why should he not prove himself brave, capable of everything? At the basis of every great sacrifice lies something superhuman, that confuses and that rends the soul. If he were a thief and could pay with his bravery something that his small, poor money could not buy; if he should ruin his whole career just to please her, should bring down upon his head the rigors of the law and his father's curses, Alicia--so he fondly believed--would love him blindly, with the same sort of frenzy that Balzac's hero, Vautrin, inspired in women.

The voice which until now had been thundering accusations in the student's storm-tossed conscience, now with soft flatterings began to wheedle and cajole him, saying:

"Alicia, your beloved Alicia would be happy with the emeralds of that necklace. If you have no way to buy it for her, go steal it! You're a cowardly wretch if you don't! What does the opinion of the crowd matter to you, egoist that you are? A man incapable of becoming a thief for a woman may love her greatly, but he does not love her to distraction. What your Alicia desires, you should give her. Have no longer any doubts, but go and steal! Steal this necklace for her and then clasp it about her neck--that neck whose snow so many times in the space of one night offered its refreshing coolness to your lips!"

These ideas combined to strengthen his more recent impressions--the impression of his visit to the dissecting-room where once more he had seen that nothing matters; and the impression of that crime of jealousy which he had heard talked about in the tavern. And all at once, Enrique Darlés felt himself calmed. His future had just been decided. He would steal. Fatality, incarnate in the body of Alicia Pardo, had just mapped out his road for him.

* * * * *

Every evening at sunset, at that hour of mystery when the street-lights begin to shine and women to seem more beautiful, the student left his lodgings and, passing through the Calle Romanos and the Calle Carmen, took his way toward the Puerta del Sol, always full of an idle, loitering crowd which seems to have nowhere to go. He always stopped in Calle Mayor, to cast an eager, timorous look into the jeweler's shop, whose show-window glowed like a bed of living coals.

This calculating, daily contemplation of those treasures completely overturned Enrique's moral standards. He, himself, did not grasp the profound change coming upon him. Steadily this thought of stealing kept growing in his soul, obsessing him, evolving into a resistless, overwhelming determination.

As if to increase his torment, the emerald necklace which served as an advertisement for the shop, found no purchaser. It was far too dear.

With his nose pressed against the plate glass of the window, Enrique suffered long moments of anguish, unable to take his eyes from that abyss, that precipice of gold and velvet at the bottom of which the diamonds, topazes, emeralds, pearls, rubies and amethysts seemed the eyes of a strange multitude peering out at him. All this time his imagination was developing a mad, adventurous tale. With his prize hidden in his most secret pocket, he would go to see Alicia and would say to her: "Here, take it! Here is your necklace, the necklace that neither Don Manuel nor any of your millionaire aristocrats would buy for you. I, gambling my life, have got it for you! What do you say now?"