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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And there was some truth in it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CÆSAR’S MANNER OF LIVING

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ONE DAY AT CHRISTMASTIME

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Then come along.”

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

“This landscape enchants me,” said CÆsar.

“It seems hard and gloomy,” responded Alzugaray.

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

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

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

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

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