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.