II. AN EXTRAORDINARY FAMILY
JUAN GUILLÉN
The Valencian family of Guillén was really fecund in men of energy and cleverness. It is true that with the exception of Father Francisco Guillén and of his nephew Juan Fort, none of them became known; but in spite of the fact that the members of this family lived in obscurity in a humble sphere, they performed deeds of unheard-of valour, daring, and impertinence.
Juan Guillén, the first of the Guilléns whose memory is preserved, was a highwayman of Villanueva.
What motives for vengeance Juan Guillén had against the Peyró family is not known. The old folk of the period, two or three who are still alive, always say that these Peyrós devoted themselves to usury; and there is some talk of a certain sister of Juan Guillén’s, ruined by one of the Peyrós, whom they made disappear from the town.
Whatever the motive was, the fact is that one day Peyró, the father, and his eldest son were found, full of bullet holes, in an orange orchard.
Juan Guillén was arrested; in court he affirmed his innocence with great tenacity; but after he had been sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment, he said that there were still two Peyrós left to kill, whom he would put off until he got out of prison.
As it turned out, Guillén was set free after six years and returned to Villanueva. The two threatened Peyrós did their utmost to keep away from the revengeful Guillén; but it did not work. Juan Guillén killed one of the Peyrós while he was watering the flowers in the balcony of his house. The other took refuge in a remote farm-house rented to peasants in his confidence. This man, who was very crafty, always took great precautions about all the people that came there, and never forgot to close the doors and windows at night.
One morning he was found in bed with his head shot to pieces by a blunderbuss. No doubt death overtook him while he slept. It was said that Guillén had got in down the chimney, and going close to where Peyró lay asleep, had fired the blunderbuss right against him. Then he had gone tranquilly out by the door, without anybody’s daring to stop him.
These two last deaths did not cause Guillén any trouble with the law. All the witnesses in the suit testified in his favour. When the trial was over, Guillén arranged to stay and live tranquilly in Villanueva.
There was a highwayman in the town, who levied small sums on the farms for cleaning young sneak-thieves out of the country, and for escorting rich persons when they travelled; Guillén requested him to give up his job and he did not offer the least resistance.
Juan Guillén married a peasant-girl, bought a truck-garden, and a wine-cave, had several children, and was one of the most respectable highwaymen in the district. He was the terror of the country, particularly to evil-doers; for him there were neither scruples nor perils; might was always right; his only limitation his blunderbuss.
To live in a continual state of war seemed to him a natural condition. Half in earnest, half in jest, it is told of the truck-gardeners of Valencia that the father always says to his wife or his daughter, when he is going to have an interview with somebody:
“Bring me my pistol, sweetheart, I am going out to talk to a man.”
To Guillén it seemed indispensable that he should carry his blunderbuss when discussing an affair with anybody.
Juan’s energy did not diminish with age; he kept on being as barbarous and brutal as when he was young. His barbarity did not prevent his being very fine and polite, because he was under the conviction that his life was a well-nigh exemplary life.
TENDER-HEARTED VICENTA
Of the highwayman’s children, the eldest son studied for the priesthood, and the youngest daughter, Vicenta, got ruined.
“I should prefer to have her a man and in the penitentiary,” Guillén used to say. Which was not at all strange, because for the highwayman the penitentiary was like a school of determination and manhood.
Vicenta, the highwayman’s youngest daughter, was a blond girl, noisy and restless, of a violent character that was proof against advice, reprimands, and beatings.
Vicenta had various beaux, all gentlemen, in spite of her father’s opposition and his cane. None of these young gentlemen beaux dared to carry the girl off to Valencia, which was what she wanted, for fear of the highwayman and his blunderbuss.
So she made arrangements with an old woman, a semi-Celestina who turned up in town, and in her company ran off to Valencia.
The father roared like a wounded lion and swore by all the saints in heaven to take a terrible revenge; he went to the capital several times with the intention of dragging his daughter back home bodily; but he could not find her.
Vicenta Guillén, who was known in Valencia,—for what reason is not evident,—as the Tender-hearted, had her ups and her downs, rich lovers and poor, and was distinguished by her boldness and her spirit of adventure. It was said of her that she had taken part, dressed as a man, in several popular disturbances.
THE MONK
While the Tender-hearted was leading a life of scandal, her brother, Francisco, was studying in the College of the Escolapians in the village, and afterwards entered the Seminary at Tortosa. He did not distinguish himself there by his intelligence or by his good conduct; but by force of time and recommendations he succeeded in getting ordained and saying mass at Villanueva. His father’s restless blood boiled in him: he was a rowdy, brutal and quarrelsome. As life in the village was uncomfortable for him, he went to America, ready to change his profession. He could not have found wide prospects among the laity, for after a few months he took the vows, and ten or twelve years later he returned to Spain, the Superior of his Order, and went to a monastery in the province of Castellón.
Francisco Guillén had changed his name, and was now called Fray José de Calasanz de Villanueva.
If Fray José de Calasanz, on his return from America, had not learned much theology, at any rate he had learned more about life than in the early years of his priesthood, and had turned into a cunning hypocrite. His passions were of extraordinary violence, and despite his ability in concealing them, he could not altogether hide his underlying barbarity.
His name figured several times, in a scandalous manner, along with the name of a certain farmer’s wife, who was a bit weak in the head.
These pieces of gossip, though they gave him a bad reputation with the town people, did not prevent him from advancing in his career, for pretty soon, and no one quite knew for what reason, he was found to have acquired importance and to wield influence of decisive weight, not only in the Order, but among the whole clerical element of the city.
At the same time that Father José de Calasanz was becoming so successful, the Tender-hearted took to the path of virtue and got married at Valencia to the proprietor of a little grocery shop in a lane near the market, his name being Antonio Fort.
The Tender-hearted, once married, wrote to her brother to get him to make her father forgive her. The monk persuaded the old bandit, and the Tender-hearted went to Villanueva to receive the paternal pardon. The Tender-hearted, being married, lived an apparently retired and devout life. Her husband was a poor devil of not much weight. The Tender-hearted gave a great impetus to the shop. After she began to run the establishment there was always a great influx of priests and monks recommended by her brother.
Some of them used to gather in the back-shop toward dusk for a tertulia, and it was said that one of the members of the tertulia,—a youthful little priest from Murcia,—had an understanding with the landlady.
The priests’ tertulia at Fort’s shop was a well-spring of riches and prosperity for the business. The little nuns of such-and-such a convent advised the ladies they knew to buy chocolate and sweets at Fort’s; the friars of another convent gave them an order for sugar or cinnamon, and cash poured into the drawer.
The Tender-hearted had three children: Juan, Jerónimo, and Isabel.
When the two elder were of an age to begin their education, Father José de Calasanz made a visit in Valencia.
Father José had a powerful influence among the clergy, and he offered his support to his sister in case she found it well to dedicate one of her sons to the church.
The Tender-hearted, who beginning to have great ambitions, considered that of her two sons, Juan, the elder, was the more serious and diligent, and she did not vacillate about sacrificing him to her ambitions.
JUAN FORT
Juan Fort was a boy of energy, very decided, although not very intelligent. His uncle, Fray José de Calasanz, when he knew him, grew fond of him. Fray José enjoyed great esteem in the Order that is called,—nobody knows whether it is in irony,—the Seraphic Order. Fray José consulted several competent persons and they advised him to send his nephew to study outside of Spain. It is known that among her ministers the Church prefers men without a country. Catholicism means universality, and the real Catholic has no other country than his religion, no other capital but Rome.
Juan Fort, snatched from among his comrades and from the bosom of his family, went weeping in his uncle’s company to France, and entered the convent of Mont-de-Marson to pursue his studies.
In this convent he made his monastic novitiate, and like all the individuals of that Order, changed his name, being called from then on, Father Vicente de Valencia.
From Mont-de-Marson he passed to Toulouse, and when two years were up, he made a short stay in the monastery where his uncle was prior, and went to Rome.
When the Tender-hearted went to embrace her son, on his passage through Valencia, she could see that his affection for her had vanished. As happens with nearly all the young men that enter a religious Order, Juan Fort felt a deep antipathy for his family and for his native town.
The young Father Vicente de Valencia entered the convent of Aracceli at Rome, and continued his studies there.
This was at the beginning of Leo XIII’s pontificate. At that epoch certain naïve elements in the Eternal City tried to initiate anti-Jesuit politics inside the Church. Liberals and Ultramontanists struggled in the darkness, in the periodicals, and in the universities.
It was a phenomenon of this struggle,—which seems paradoxical,—that the partisans of tradition were the most liberal, and the partisans of Modernism the Ultramontanists. The lesser clergy and certain Cardinals felt vaguely liberal, and were searching for that something Christian, which, as people say, still remains in Catholicism. On the other hand, the Congregations, and above all the Jesuits, gave the note of radical Ultramontanism.
The sons of Loyola had solved the culinary problem of making a meat-stew without meat; the Jesuits were making their Company the most anti-Christian of the Societies in the silent partnership.
In Rome the prime defender of Ultramontanism had been the Abbé Perrone, an eloquent professor, whom the pressure of the traditional theologians obliged to read, before giving a lecture, a chapter of Saint Thomas on the point in question. Perrone, after offering, with gnashing of teeth, this tribute to tradition, used to say proudly: “And now, let us forget these old saws and get along.”
Father Vicente de Valencia enrolled himself among the supporters of the Perronean Ultramontanism, and became, as was natural, considering his character, a furious authoritarian. This sombre man, whose vocation was repugnant to him, who had not the least religious feeling, who could perhaps have been a good soldier, took a long time to make himself perfectly at home in monastic life, struggled against the chains that chafed him, rebelled inwardly, and at last, not only did not succeed in breaking his fetters, but even considered them his one happiness.
Little by little he dominated his rebelliousness, and he made himself a great worker and a tireless intriguer.
The fruits of his will were great, greater than those of his intellect.
Father Vicente wrote a theological treatise in Latin, rather uncouth, so the intellectual said, and which had the sole distinction of representing the most rabid of reactionary tendencies.
The Theological Commentaries of Father Vicente de Valencia did not attract the attention of the men who follow the sport of occupying themselves with such things, whether or no; the presses did not groan printing criticisms of the book; but the Society of Jesus took note of the author and assisted Fort with all its power.
A fanatic and a man of mediocre intelligence, that monk might perhaps be a considerable force in the hands of the Society.
A short while after the publication of his Commentaries, Father Vicente accompanied the general of his Order on a canonical visit to the monasteries in Spain, France, and Italy; later he was appointed successively Visitor General for Spain, Consultor of the monastic province of Valencia, Definer of the Order, and a voting councillor in the government of the Order.
The news of these honours reached the Fort family in vague form; the haughty monk gave no account of his successes. He considered himself to be without a country and without a family.
THE CARDINAL’S NEPHEW AND NIECE
The Tender-hearted died without having the consolation of seeing her son again; Jerónimo Fort, the youngest child, became head of the shop, Isabel married a soldier, Carlos Moncada, with whom she went to live in Madrid.
Isabel Fort lived there a long time without remembering her monk brother, until she learned, to her great surprise, that they had made him a Cardinal.
Father Vicente left off calling himself that and changed into Cardinal Fort. The darkness that surrounded him turned to light, and his figure stood out strongly.
“Cardinale Forte,” they called him in Rome. He was known to be one of the persons that guided the Vatican camarilla, and one of those who impelled Leo XIII to rectify the slightly liberal policy of the first years of his pontificate.
Cardinal Fort filled high posts. He was a Consultor in the Congregation of Bishops and Regulars, afterwards in that of Rites and in that of the Holy Office, and on special occasions was confessor to Leo XIII.
Certainly having a Cardinal in the family is something that makes a showing; and Isabel, as soon as she knew it, wrote by the advice of the family, to her brother, so as to renew relations with him.
The Cardinal replied, expressing interest in her husband and her children. Isabel sent him their pictures, and phrases of affection were cordially interchanged.
After that they kept on writing to each other, and in one letter the Cardinal invited Isabel to come to Rome. She hesitated; but her husband convinced her that she ought to accept the invitation. They all of them went, and the Cardinal received them very affectionately.
Juan Fort was living at that time in a monastery, like the other monks. He enjoyed an enormous influence in Rome and in Spain. Isabel wanted her husband promoted, and the Cardinal obtained that in a moment.
Then Fort talked to his sister of the propriety of dedicating Cæsar to the Church. He would enter the College of Nobles, then he would pass to the Nunciature, and in a short while he would be a potentate.
Doña Isabel told this to her husband; but the idea didn’t please him. They talked among themselves, they discussed it, and the small boy, then twelve years old, settled the question himself, saying that he would kill himself rather than be a priest or a monk, because he was a Republican.
The Cardinal was not enthusiastic over this rebellious youngster who dared to speak out what he, in his childhood, would not have been bold enough to insinuate; but if Cæsar did not appeal to him, on the other hand he was very much taken with Laura’s beauty and charm.
The Moncada family returned to Spain after spending some months in Rome. Two years later Doña Isabel’s husband died, and she, recalling the offers of her brother, the Cardinal, left Cæsar in an Escolapian college in Madrid, and went to Rome, taking Laura with her.
The Cardinal, in the meanwhile, had changed his position and his domicile; he was now living in the Palazzo Altemps in the Via di S. Apellinare, and leading a more sumptuous life.
They reproached him in Rome for his exclusiveness and at the same time for his tendency to ostentation. They said that if he was silent about himself, it was not through modesty, but because that is the best method to arrive at being a candidate for the tiara.
They added that he was very fond of showing himself in his red robes, and in fine carriages, and this ostentatious taste was explained among the Italians by saying: “It’s simple enough; he is Spanish.”
Publicly it was said that he was a great theologian, but privately he was considered a strong man, although of mediocre intelligence.
“A Fort is always strong,” they said of him, making a pun on his name. “He is one of the Spanish Eminences who rule the Pope,” a great English periodical stated, referring to him.
On receiving his sister and his niece, the Cardinal put all his influence with the Black Party in play so that they should be accepted by the aristocratic society of Rome. He achieved that without much difficulty. Laura and her mother were naturaly distinguished and tactful, and they succeeded in forming a circle.
The Cardinal felt proud of his family; and accompanying the two women gave him occasion for visiting many people.
Roman slander calumniated Fort, assuming him to be having a love affair with his niece. Juan Fort showed an affection for Laura which seemed unheard of by those that knew him.
The Cardinal was a man of exuberant pride, and he knew how to control himself. He felt a great fondness for Laura; but if there was anything more in this fondness than tranquil fatherly affection, if there was any passion, only he knew it; the fire lurked very deep in his overshaded soul.
Laura made, socially speaking, a good marriage. She married the Marquis of Vaccarone, a babbling Neapolitan, insubstantial and light. In a short while, seeing that they were not congenial, she arranged for an amicable separation and the two lived independent.
III. CÆSAR MONCADA
AT THE ESCOLAPIANS
Cæsar studied in Madrid in an Escolapian college in the Calle de Hortaleza, where he was an intern all the time he was taking his bachelor’s degree.
His mother had gone to live in Valencia, after marrying Laura off, and Cæsar passed his vacations with her at a country-place in a neighbouring village.
Several times a year Cæsar received letters and photographs from his sister, and one winter Laura came to Valencia. She retained a great fondness for Cæsar; he was fond of her too, although he did not show it, because his character was little inclined to affectionate expansion.
At college Cæsar showed himself to be a somewhat strange and absurd youth. As he was slight and of a sickly appearance, the teachers treated him with a certain consideration.
One day a teacher noticed that Cæsar creaked when he moved, as if his clothes were starched.
“What are you wearing?” he asked him.
“Nothing.”
“Nothing, indeed! Unbutton your jacket.”
Cæsar turned very pale and did not unbutton it; but the master, seizing him by a lapel, unbuttoned his jacket and his waistcoat, and found that the student was covered with papers.
“What are these papers? For what purpose are you keeping them here?”
“He does it,” one of his fellow students replied, laughing, “because he is afraid of catching cold and becoming consumptive.” They all made comments on the boy’s eccentricity, and a few days later, to show that he was not a coward, he tried to go out on the balcony on a cold winter night, with his chest bare.
Among his fellow-students Cæsar had an intimate friend, Ignacio Alzugaray, to whom he confided and explained his prejudices and doubts. Alzugaray was not a boarder, but a day-scholar.
Ignacio brought anti-clerical periodicals to school, which Cæsar read with enthusiasm. His sojourn in a religious college was producing a frantic hatred for priests in young Moncada.
Cæsar was remarkable for the rapidity of his decisions and the lack of vacillation in his opinions. He felt no timidity about either affirming or denying.
His convictions were absolute; when he believed in the exact truth of a thing, he did not vacillate, he did not go back and discuss it; but if his belief faltered, then he changed his opinion radically and went ahead stating the contrary of his previous statements, without recollecting his abandoned ideas.
His other fellow-students did not care about discussions with a lad who appeared to have a monopoly of the truth.
“Professor So-and-So is a beast; What-you-call-him is a talented chap; that fellow is a thick-witted chap. This kid is all right; that one is not.”
In this rail-splitting manner did young Moncada announce his decisions, as if he held the secret explanation of all things tight between his fingers.
Alzugaray seldom shared his friend’s opinions; but in spite of this divergence they understood each other very well.
Alzugaray came of a modest family; his mother, the widow of a government clerk, lived on her pension and on the income from some property they owned in the North.
Ignacio Alzugaray was very fond of his mother and his sister, and was always talking about them. Cæsar alone would listen without being impatient to the meticulous narratives Ignacio told about the things that happened at home.
Alzugaray was of a very Catholic and very Carlist family; but like Cæsar, he was beginning to protest against such ideas and to show himself Liberal, Republican, and even Anarchistic. Ignacio Alzugaray was a nephew of Carlos Yarza, the Spanish author, who lived in Paris, and who had taken part in the Commune and in the Insurrection of Cartagena.
Cæsar, on hearing Alzugaray recount the doings of his uncle Carlos Yarza various times, said to his fellow-student:
“When I get out of this college, the first thing I am going to do is to go to Paris to talk with your uncle.”
“What for?”
“I have to talk to him.”
As a matter of fact, once his course was finished, Cæsar left the college, took a third-class ticket, went to Paris, and from there wrote to his mother informing her what he had done. Carlos Yarza, Alzugaray’s uncle, received him very affectionately. He took him to dine and explained a good many things. Cæsar asked the old man no end of questions and listened to him with real avidity.
Carlos Yarza was at that time an employee in a bank. At this epoch his forte was for questions of speculation. He had put his mind and his will to the study of these matters and had the glimmering of a system in things where everybody else saw only contingencies without any possible law.
Cæsar accompanied Yarza to the Bourse and was amazed and stirred at seeing the enormous activity there.
Yarza cleared away the innumerable doubts that occurred to the boy.
In the short time Cæsar spent in Paris he came to a most important conclusion, which was that in this life one had to fight terribly to get anywhere.
One day, on awakening in the shabby little room where he lodged, he found that the arms of a very smart woman were around his neck. It was Laura, very contented and joyful to surprise her madcap brother.
“Mamma is alarmed,” Laura told him. “What are you doing here all this time? Are you in love?” “I? Bah!”
“Then what have you been doing?”
“I’ve been going to the Bourse.”
SOUNDING-LINES IN LIFE
Laura burst out laughing, and she accompanied her brother back to Valencia. Cæsar’s mother wished the lad to take his law course there, but Cæsar decided to do it in Madrid.
“A provincial capital is an insupportable place,” he said.
Cæsar went to Madrid and rented a study and a bed-room, cheap and unrestricted.
He boarded in one house and lodged at another. Thus he felt more free.
Cæsar believed that it was not worth the trouble to study law seriously; and he imagined moreover that to study so many routine conceptions, which may be false, such as the conception of the soul, of equity, of responsibility, etc., would bring him to a shyster lawyer’s vulgar and affected idea of life. To counteract this tendency he devoted himself to studying zoology at the University, and the next year he took a course in physiology at San Carlos.
At the same time he did not neglect the stock exchange; his great pride was to acquaint himself thoroughly with the details of the speculations made and to talk in the crowds.
As a student he was mediocre. He learned the secret of passing examinations well with the minimum of effort, and practised it. He found that by knowing only a couple of things under each heading of the program, it was enough for him to answer and to pass well. And so, from the beginning of each course, he marked in the text the two or three lines of every page which seemed to him to comprise the essential, and having learned those, considered his knowledge sufficient.
Cæsar had a deep contempt for the University and for his fellow-students; all their rows and manifestations seemed to him repulsively flat and stupid.
Alzugaray was studying law too, and had obtained a clerkship in a Ministry. Alzugaray got drunk on music. His great enthusiasm was for playing the ‘cello. Cæsar used to call on him at his office and at home.
The clerks at the Ministry seemed to Cæsar to form part of an inferior human race.
At Alzugaray’s house, Cæsar felt at home. Ignacio’s mother, a lady with white hair, was always making stockings, and after dinner she recited the rosary with the maid; Alzugaray’s sister, Celedonia, a tall ungainly lass, was often ill.
All the family thought a great deal of Cæsar; his advice was followed at that house, and one of the operations on ‘change that he recommended making with some Foreign bonds that Ignacio’s mother was holding at the time of the Cuban War, gave everybody in the house an extraordinary idea of young Moncada’s financial talents.
Cæsar kept his balance among his separate activities; one set of studies complemented others. This diversity of points of view kept him from taking the false and one-sided position that those who preoccupy themselves with one branch of knowledge exclusively get into.
The one-sided position is most useful to a specialist, to a man who expects to remain satisfied in the place where chance has put him; but it is useless for one who proposes to enter life with his blood afire.
As almost always occurs, the projecting of ideas of distinct derivation and of different orders into the same plane, carried Cæsar into absolute scepticism, scepticism about things, and especially scepticism about the instrument of knowledge.
His negation had no reference,—far from it,—to women, to love, or to friends, things where the pedantic and ostentatious scepticism of literary men of the Larra type usually finds its fodder; his nihilism was much more the confusion and discomposure of one that explores a region well or badly, and finds no landmarks there, no paths, and returns with a belief that even the compass is not exact in what it shows.
“Nothing absolute exists,” Cæsar told himself, “neither science nor mathematics nor even the truth, can be an absolute thing.”
Arriving at this result surprised Cæsar a good deal. On finding that he was not successful in lighting on a philosophical system which would be a guide to him and which could be reasoned out like a theorem, he sought within the purely subjective for something that might satisfy him and serve as a standard.
A PHILOSOPHY
Toward the end of their course Cæsar presented himself one day in his friend Alzugaray’s office.
“I think,” he said, “that I am getting my philosophy into shape.”
“My dear man!”
“Yes. I have tacked some new contours on to my Darwinian pragmatism.”
Alzugaray, in whom every treasure-trove of his friend’s always produced great surprise, stood staring naïvely at him.
“Yes, I am building up my system,” Cæsar went on, “a system within relative truth. It is clear.”
“Let’s hear what it is.”
“In regard to us,” said Cæsar, as if he were speaking of something that had happened in the street a few minutes before, “our uncertain instrument of knowledge makes two apparent states of nature seem real to us; one, the static, in which things are perceived by us as motionless; the other, the dynamic, wherein these same things are found in motion. It is clear that in reality everything is in motion; but within the relative truth of our ideas we are able to believe that there are some things in repose and others in action. Isn’t that so?”
“Yes. That is, I think so,” replied Alzugaray, who was beginning to wonder if the whole earth was trembling under his feet.
“Good!” Cæsar continued. “I am going to pass from nature to life: I am going to assume that life has a purpose. Where can this purpose be found? We don’t know. But what can be the machinery of this purpose? Only movement, action. That is to say, struggle. This assertion once made, I am going to take a hand in carrying it out. The things we call spiritual also are dynamic. Who says anything whatsoever says matter and force; who says force affirms attraction and repulsion; attraction and repulsion are synonymous with movement, with struggle, with action. Now I am inside of my system. It will consist of putting all the forces near me into movement, into action, into struggle. What pleasure may there be in this? First, the pleasure of doing, the pleasure, we might call it, of efficiency; secondly, the pleasure of seeing, the pleasure of observing.... What do you think of it?”
“Fine, man! The things you start are always good.” “Then there is the moral point. I think I have settled that too.”
“That too?”
“Yes. Morals should be nothing more than the true, fitting, and natural law of man. Man considered solely as a spiritual machine? No. Considered as an animal that eats and drinks? Not that either. Man considered as a complete whole. Isn’t that so?”
“I believe it is.”
“I proceed. In nature laws become more obscure, according as more complicated objects of knowledge turn up. We all clearly see the law of the triangle, and the law of oxygen or of carbon with the same clearness. These laws appear to us as being without exception. But then comes the mineral, and we begin to see variations; in this form it exerts one attraction, in that form a different one. We ascend to the vegetable and find a sort of surprise-package. The surprises are centupled in the animal; and are raised to an unknown degree in man. What is the law of man, as man? We do not know it, probably we shall never know it. Right and justice may be truths, but they will always be fractional truths. Traditional morality is a pragmatism, useful and efficacious for social life, for well-ordered life; but at the bottom, without reality. Summing all this up: first, life is a labyrinth which has no Ariadne’s thread but one,—action; secondly, man is upheld in his high qualities by force and struggle. Those are my conclusions.”
“Clever devil! I don’t know what to say to you.”
Alzugaray asserted that, without taking it upon him to say whether his friend’s ideas were good or bad, they had no practical value; but Cæsar insisted once and many times on the advantages he saw in his metaphysics.
ENCHIRIDION SAPIENTIAE
Cæsar remained in the same sphere during the whole period of his law course, always seeking, according to his own words, to add one wheel more to his machine.
His life contained few incidents; summers he went to Valencia, and there, in the villa, he read and talked with the peasants. His mother, devoted solely to the Church, bothered herself little about her son.
Cæsar ended his studies, and on his coming of age, they gave him his share of his father’s estate.
Incontinently he took the train, he went to Paris, he looked up Yarza. He explained to him his vague projects of action. Yarza listened attentively, and said:
“Perhaps it will appear foolish to you, but I am going to give you a book I wrote, which I should like you to read. It’s called Enchiridion Sapientiae. In my youth I was something of a Latinist. In these pages, less than a hundred, I have gathered my observations about the financial and political world. It might as well be called Contribution to Common-sense, or Neo-Machiavellianism. If you find that it helps you, keep it.”
Cæsar read the book with concentrated attention.
“How did it strike you?” said Yarza.
“There are many things in it I don’t agree with; I shall have to think over them again.”
“All right. Then keep my Enchiridion and go on to London. Paris is a city that has finished. It is not worth the trouble of losing one’s time staying here.”
Cæsar went to London, always with the firm intention of going into something. From time to time he wrote a long letter to Ignacio Alzugaray, telling him his impressions of politics and financial questions.
While he was in London his sister joined him and invited him to go to Florence; two years later she begged him to accompany her to Rome. Cæsar had always declined to visit the Eternal City, until, on that occasion, he himself showed a desire to go to Rome with his sister.
IV. PEOPLE WHO PASS CLOSE BY
THE SAN MARTINO YOUNG LADIES
Arrived at Rome, Laura and Cæsar went up to the hotel, and were received by a bald gentleman with a pointed moustache, who showed them into a large round salon with a very high ceiling.
It was a theatrical salon, with antique furniture and large red-velvet arm-chairs with gilded legs. The enormous mirrors, somewhat tarnished by age, made the salon appear even larger. On the consoles and cabinets gleamed objects of majolica and porcelain.
The big window of this salon opened on the Piazza Esedra di Termini. Cæsar and Laura looked out through the glass. It was beginning to rain again; the great semi-circular extent of the square was shining with rain.
The passing trams slipped around the curve in the track; a caravan of tourists in ten or twelve carriages in file, all with their umbrellas open, were preparing to visit the monuments of Rome; strolling pedlars were showing them knick-knacks and religious gewgaws.
Cæsar’s and Laura’s rooms were got ready and the manager of the hotel asked them again if they had need of nothing else.
“What are you going to do?” said Laura to her brother.
“I am going to stretch myself out in bed for a while.”
“Lunch at half-past twelve.”
“Good, I will get up at that time.”
“Good-bye, bambino. Have a good rest. Put on your black suit to come to the table.”
“Very well.” Cæsar stretched himself on the bed, slept off and on, somewhat feverish from fatigue, and at about twelve he woke at the noise they made in bringing his luggage into the room. He got up to open the trunks, washed and dressed, and when the customary gong resounded, he presented himself in the salon.
Laura was chatting with two young ladies and an older lady, the Countess of San Martino and her daughters. They were in Rome for the season and lived regularly in Venice.
Laura introduced her brother to these ladies, and the Countess pressed Cæsar’s hand between both of hers, very affectionately.
The Countess was tiny and dried-up: a mummy with the face of a grey-hound, her skin close to her bones, her lips painted, little penetrating blue eyes, and great vivacity in her movements. She dressed in a showy manner; wore jewels on her bosom, on her head, on her fingers.
The daughters looked like two little blond princesses: with rosy cheeks, eyebrows like two golden brush-strokes, almost colourless, clear blue eyes of a heavenly blue, and such small red lips, that on seeing them, the classical simile of cherries came at once to one’s mind.
The Countess of San Martino asked Cæsar like a shot if he was married and if he hadn’t a sweetheart. Cæsar replied that he was a bachelor and that he had no sweetheart, and then the Countess came back by asking if he felt no vocation for matrimony.
“No, I believe I don’t,” responded Cæsar.
The two young women smiled, and their mother said, with truly diverting familiarity, that men were becoming impossible. Afterwards she added that she was anxious for her daughters to marry.
“When one of these children is married and has a bambino, I shall be more contented! If God sent me a cheru-bino del cielo, I shouldn’t be more so.”
Laura laughed, and one of the little blondes remarked with aristocratic indifference: “Getting married comes first, mamma.”
To this the Countess of San Martino observed that she didn’t understand the behaviour of girls nowadays.
“When I was a young thing, I always had five or six beaux at once; but my daughters haven’t the same idea. They are so indifferent, so superior!”
“It seems that you two don’t take all the notice you should,” said Cæsar to the girls in French.
“You see what a mistake it is,” answered one of them, smiling.
The last round of the gong sounded and various persons entered the salon. Laura knew the majority of them and introduced them, as they came, to her brother.
OBSERVATIONS BY CÆSAR
The waiter appeared at the door, announced that lunch was ready, and they all passed into the dining-room.
Laura and her brother were installed at a small table beside the window.
The dining-room, very large and very high, flaunted decorations copied from some palace. They consisted of a tapestry with garlands of flowers, and medallions. In each medallion were the letters S.P.Q.R. and various epicurean phrases of the Romans: “Carpe diem. Post mortem nulla voluptas,” et cetera.
“Beautiful decoration, but very cold,” said Cæsar. “I should prefer rather fewer mottoes and a little more warmth.”
“You are very hard to please,” retorted Laura.
Shortly after getting seated, everybody began to talk from table to table and even from one end of the room to the other. There was none of that classic coolness among the people in the hotel which the English have spread everywhere, along with underdone meat and bottled sauces.
Cæsar devoted himself for the first few moments to ethnology.
“Even from the people you find here, you can see that there is a great diversity of ethnic type in Italy,” he said to Laura. “That blond boy and the Misses San Martino are surely of Saxon origin; the waiter, on the other hand, swarthy like that, is a Berber.”
“Because the blond boy and the San Martines are from the North, and the waiter must be Neapolitan or Sicilian.
“Besides, there is still another type: shown by that dark young woman over there, with the melancholy air. She must be a Celtic type. What is obvious is that there is great liveliness in these people, great elegance in their movements. They are like actors giving a good performance.”
Cæsar’s observations were interrupted by the arrival of a dark, plump woman, who came in from the street, accompanied by her daughter, a blond girl, fat, smiling, and a bit timid.
This lady and Laura bowed with much ceremony.
“Who is she?” asked Cæsar in a low tone.
“It is the Countess Brenda,” said Laura.
“Another countess! But are all the women here countesses?”
“Don’t talk nonsense.”
At the other end of the dining-room a young Neapolitan with the expression of a Pulcinella and violent gestures, raised his sing-song voice, talking very loud and making everybody laugh.
After lunching, Cæsar went out to post some cards, and as it was raining buckets, he took refuge in the arcades of the Piazza Esedra.
When he was tired of walking he returned to the hotel, went to his room, turned on the light, and started to continue his unfinished perusal of Proudhon’s book on the speculator.
And while he read, there came from the salon the notes of a Tzigane waltz played on the piano.
ART, FOR DECEIVED HUSBANDS
Cæsar was writing something on the margin of a page when there came a knock at his door. “Come in,” said Cæsar.
It was Laura.
“Where are you keeping yourself?” she asked.
“Here I am, reading a little.”
“But my dear man, we are waiting for you.”
“What for?”
“The idea, what for? To talk.”
“I don’t feel like talking. I am very tired.”
“But, bambino; Benedetto. Are you going to live your life avoiding everybody?”
“No; I will come out tomorrow.”
“What do you want to do tonight?”
“Tonight! Nothing.”
“Don’t you want to go to the theatre?”
“No, no; I have a tremendously weak pulse, and a little fever. My hands are on fire at this moment.”
“What foolishness!”
“It’s true.”
“So then you won’t come out?”
“No.”
“All right. As you wish.”
“When the weather is good, I will go out.”
“Do you want me to fetch you a Baedeker?”
“No, I have no use for it.”
“Don’t you intend to look at the sights, either?”
“Yes, I will look willingly at what comes before my eyes; it wouldn’t please me if the same thing happened to me that took place in Florence.”
“What happened to you in Florence?”
“I lost my time lamentably, getting enthusiastic over Botticelli, Donatello, and a lot of other foolishness, and when I got back to London it cost me a good deal of work to succeed in forgetting those things and getting myself settled in my financial investigations again. So that now I have decided to see nothing except in leisure moments and without attaching any importance to all those fiddle-faddles.” “But what childishness! Is it going to distract you so much from your work, from that serious work you have in hand, to go and see a few pictures or some statues?”
“To see them, no, not exactly; but to occupy myself with them, yes. Art is a good thing for those who haven’t the strength to live, in realities. It is a good form of sport for old maids, for deceived husbands who need consolation, as hysterical persons need morphine....”
“And for strong people like you, what is there?” asked Laura, ironically.
“For strong people!... Action.”
“And you call lying in bed, reading, action?”
“Yes, when one reads with the intentions I read with.”
“And what are they? What is it you are plotting?”
“I will tell you.”
Laura saw that she could not convince her brother, and returned to the salon. A moment before dinner was announced Cæsar got dressed again in black, put on his patent-leather shoes, looked at himself offhandedly in the mirror, saw that he was all right, and joined his sister.