The wedding took place and CÆsar had to compromise about a lot of things. It didn’t trouble him to confess and receive communion; he considered those mere customs, and went to the church of the Plain to conform to these practices with the old priest who was a friend of Amparito’s.

On the other hand, it did bother CÆsar to have to suffer Father Martin in his house, who allowed himself to talk and give advice; and he was also irritated by the presence of certain persons who considered themselves aristocrats and who came to call on him and point out to him that it was now time to give up the rabble and the indigent and to rise to their level.

If he had not had so much to think about as he did have, he would have found this a good chance to show his aggressive humour; but all his attention was fixed on Amparito.

The newly married pair spent the first days of their honeymoon at Castro; then they went to Madrid, with the intention of going abroad, and afterwards they went back to the town.

The old palace of the Dukes of Castro was witness to their idyll.

At the end of some time CÆsar felt tranquil, perhaps too tranquil.

“This, no doubt, is what is called being happy,” he used to say to himself. And being happy gave him the impression of a limbo; he felt as though his old personality was dying within him. He could no longer recover his former way of life; all his disquietudes had vanished. He felt that he was balanced, lacking those alternations of courage and cowardice which had previously formed the characteristic thing in him. It was the oasis after the desert; the calm that follows the storm.

CÆsar wondered if he had acquired new nerves. His instinct to be arbitrary was on the downward track.

He could not easily determine what role his wife played in his inner life. He felt the necessity of having her beside him, of talking to her; but he did not understand whether this was mere selfishness, for the sake of the soothing effect her presence produced, or was for the satisfaction of his vanity in seeing how she gave all her thought to him.

Spiritually he did not feel her either identified with him or strange to him; her soul marched along as if parallel to his, but in other paths.

“All that men say about women is completely false,” CÆsar used to think, “and what women say about themselves, equally so, because they merely repeat what men say. Only when they are completely emancipated will they succeed in understanding themselves. It is indubitable that we have not the same leading ideas, or the same points of view. Probably we have not a similar moral sense either. Neither is woman made for man, nor man for woman. There is necessity between them, not harmony.”

Many times, watching Amparito, he told himself:

“There is some sort of machinery in her head that I do not understand.”

Noting his scrutinizing gaze, she would ask him:

“What are you thinking about me?”

He would explain his perplexities, and she would laugh.

SYMPATHY

Indubitably, there existed an instinctive accord of the sentiments between Amparito and him, an organic sympathy. She could feel for them both, but he could not think for them both; each mental machine ran in isolation, like two watches, which do not hear each other. She knew whether CÆsar was sad or joyful, disheartened or spirited, merely by looking at him. She had no need to ask him; she could read CÆsar’s face. He could not, on his side, understand what went on behind that little forehead and those moist and sparkling eyes.

“Are you feeling happy? Are you feeling sad?” he would ask her. He could not reach the point of knowing by himself.

“I never succeed in knowing what you want,” he sometimes said to her, bitterly.

“Why, you always succeed,” she used to reply.

CÆsar often wondered if the rÔle of being so much loved, whether wrong or right, was an absurd, offensive thing. In all great affections there is one peculiarity; if one loves a person, one gets to the point of changing that person to an idol inside oneself, and from that moment it seems that the person divides into the unreal idol, which is like a false picture of the adored one, and the living being, who resembles the idolized object very slightly.

CÆsar found something absurd in being loved like that. Besides, he found that she was dragging him away from himself. After six months of marriage, she was making him change his ideas and his way of life, and he was having absolutely no influence on her.

Previously he had often thought that if he lived with a woman, he should prefer one that was spiritually foreign to him, who should look on him like a rare plant, not with one that would want to identify herself with his tastes and his sympathies.

With a somewhat hostile woman he would have felt an inclination to be voluble and contradictory; with a sympathetic woman, on the contrary, he would have seemed to himself like a circus runner whom one of his pupils is trying to overtake, and who has to run hard to keep the record where it belongs.

But his wife was neither one nor the other.

Amparito had an extraordinary insouciance, gaiety, facility, in accepting life. CÆsar never ceased being amazed. She spent her days working, talking, singing. The slightest diversion enchanted her, the most insignificant gift aroused a lively satisfaction.

“Everything is decided, as far as you are concerned,” CÆsar used, to tell her.

“By what?”

“By your character.”

She laughed at that.

It seemed as if she had chosen the best attitude toward life. She saw that her husband was not religious, but she considered that an attribute of men, and thought that God must have an especial complacency toward husbands, if only so as not to leave wives alone in paradise.

Amparito held by a fetichistic Catholicism, conditioned by her situation in life, and mixed with a lot of heterodox and contradictory ideas, but she didn’t give any thought to that.

The marriage was very successful; they never had disputes or discussions. When both were stubborn, they never noticed which one yielded.

They had rented one rather big floor facing on the Retiro, and they began to furnish it.

Amparito had bad taste in decoration; everything loud pleased her, and sometimes when CÆsar laughed, she would say:

“I know I am a crazy country girl. You must tell me how to fix things.”

CÆsar decided the arrangement of a little reception-room. He chose a light paper for the walls, some coloured engravings, and Empire furniture. Female friends found the room very well done. Amparito used to tell them:

“Yes, CÆsar had it done like this,” as if that were a weighty argument with everybody.

Amparito and her father persuaded CÆsar that he ought to open an office. All the people in Castro lamented that CÆsar did not practise law.

He had always felt a great repugnance for that sharpers’ and skinflints’ business; but he yielded to please Amparito, and set up his office and took an assistant who was very skillful in legal tricks. CÆsar was often to be found writing in the office, when Amparito opened the door.

“Do you want to come here a moment?” she would say.

“Yes. What is it?”

“Look and see how this hat suits me. How do you like it?”

CÆsar would laugh and say:

“I think you ought to take off the flowers, or it ought to be smaller.”

Amparito accepted CÆsar’s suggestions as if they had been, articles of faith.

CÆsar, on his part, had a great admiration for his wife. What strength for facing life! What amazing energy!

“I walk among brambles and leave a piece of my clothing on every one of them,” thought CÆsar, “and she passes artlessly between all obstacles, with the ease of an ethereal thing. It’s extraordinary!”

It pleased Amparito to be thus observed.

Her husband used to tell her:

“You have, as it were, ten or twelve Amparitos inside of you; it often seems to me that you are a whole round of Amparitos.”

“Well, you are not more than one CÆsar to me.”

“That’s because I have the ugly vice of talking and of being consequential.”

“Don’t I talk?”

“Yes, in another way.”

DOUBT

In the spring they went to Castro, and the members of the Workmen’s Club presented themselves before CÆsar to remind him of a project for a Co-operative and a School, which he had promised them. They were all ready to put up what was necessary for realizing both plans.

CÆsar listened to them, and although with great coldness, said yes, that he was ready to initiate the scheme. A few days later, in Dr. Ortigosa’s Protest, there was enthusiastic talk of the Great Co-operative, which, when established, would improve, and at the same time cheapen necessary articles.

The same day that the paper came out with this news, a commission of the shopkeepers of Castro waited on CÆsar. The scheme would ruin them. It was especially the small shopkeepers that considered themselves most injured.

CÆsar replied that he would think it over and decide in an equitable manner, looking for a way to harmonize the interests of all people. Really he didn’t know what to do, and as he had no great desire to begin new undertakings, he wanted to call the Co-operative dead, but Dr. Ortigosa was not disposed to abandon the idea.

“It is certain that if goods are made cheaper,” said the doctor, “and the Co-operative is opened to the public, the shopkeepers will have to fight it, and then either they or we shall be ruined; but something else can be done, and that is to sell articles to the public at the same price as the tradesmen, and arrange it that members get a dividend from the profits of the society. In that way there will be no fight, at any rate not at first.”

They tried to do it that way, but it did not satisfy the poor people, or calm the shopkeepers.

CÆsar, who had lost his lust for a fight, put the scheme aside; and although it would cost him more, decided to have the construction of the school begun.

The Municipality ceded the lot and granted a subsidy of five thousand pesetas to start the work; CÆsar gave ten thousand, and at the Workmen’s Club a subscription was opened, and performances were given in the theatre to collect funds.

The school promised to be a spacious edifice with a beautiful garden. The corner-stone was laid in the presence of the Governor of the Province, and despite the fact that the founders’ intention was to found a lay school, the Clerical element took part in the celebration.

When the work began, the majority of the members of the Club were shocked to find that the masons, instead of working on the same conditions as for other jobs, asked more pay, as if the school where their sons might study were an institution more harmful than beneficial for them.

CÆsar, on learning this, smiled bitterly and said:

“They are not obliged to be less of brutes than the bourgeoisie.”

From Madrid CÆsar continued sending maps for the school, engravings, bas-reliefs, a moving-picture machine.

Dr. Ortigosa and his friends went every day to look over the work.

A year from the beginning of work, the boys and girls’ school was opened. Dr. Ortigosa succeeded in arranging that two of the three male teachers they procured were Free-Thinkers. One of them, a poor man who had lived a dog’s life in some town in Andalusia, was reputed to be an anarchist. They appointed three female teachers too, two old, and one young, a very attractive and clever girl, who came from a town near Bilboa.

CÆsar took part in the opening, and spoke, and received enthusiastic applause. Despite which, CÆsar felt ill at ease among his old friends; in his heart he knew that he was deserting them. He now thought it unlikely, almost impossible, that that town should succeed in emerging from obscurity and meaning something in modern life. Moreover, he doubted about himself, began to think that he was not a hero, began to believe that he had assigned himself a role beyond his powers; and this precisely at the moment when the town had the most faith in him.