Po Baroja

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CHAPTER I

Sandoval—SÁnchez GÓmez’s “Toads”—Jacob and JesÚs.

Manuel and Roberto left the station together.

“Are you going to begin your old life all over again?” asked Roberto. “Why don’t you make up your mind once and for all to go to work?”

“Where? I’m no good at hunting for a job. Do you know anything I could get? Some printing shop....”

“Would you be willing to go in as an apprentice, without any pay?”

“Yes. What will it be?”

“If you’ve no objections, I’ll take you this instant to the head of a certain newspaper. Come along.”

They ascended to the Plaza de San Marcial, then went on through the Calle de los Reyes to the Calle de San Bernardo; reaching the Calle del Pez they entered a house. They knocked at a door on the main floor; a scrawny woman appeared, informing them that the gentleman whom Roberto had called for was asleep and had left word not to be disturbed.

“I’m a friend of his,” answered Roberto. “I’ll wake him up.”

The two made their way through a corridor to a dark room that reeked foully with iodoform. Roberto knocked.

“Sandoval!”

“What’s the trouble? What’s the matter?” shouted a powerful voice.

“It’s I; Roberto.”

There came the sounds of a man in his underclothes stepping out of bed and opening the shutters of the balcony; then they could see him return to his spacious bed.

He was a man of about forty, chubby-cheeked, corpulent, with a black beard.

“What’s the time?” he asked, stretching his limbs.

“Ten.”

“The devil, you say! As early as that? I’m glad you woke me; I’ve so many things to do. Shout down the corridor for me, will you.”

Roberto yelled a sonorous “Eh!” whereupon a painted girl walked into the room in evident ill-humor.

“Go fetch my clothes,” ordered Sandoval, and with an effort he sat up in bed, yawned stupidly and began to scratch his arms.

“What brings you here?” he queried.

“Well, you remember you told me the other day that you needed a boy in the office. I’ve brought you this one.”

“Why, man, I’ve already hired another.”

“Then there’s nothing to be done.”

“But I believe they need one at the printing shop.”

“SÁnchez GÓmez doesn’t think much of me.”

“I’ll talk to him. He can’t refuse me this.”

“Will you forget?”

“No, no I’ll not.”

“Bah! Write him; that would be better.”

“Very well. I’ll write him.”

“No. This very moment. Just a few words.”

As they spoke, Manuel observed the room with intense curiosity; it was unbelievably upset and filthy. The furniture comprised—the bed, a commode, an iron washstand, a shelf and two broken chairs. The commode and the shelf were heaped with papers and books whose binding was falling away. On the chairs lay petticoats and dresses. The floor was littered with cigar stubs, scraps of newspaper and pieces of absorbent cotton that had been used in some cure or other. Under the table reposed an iron wash bowl that had been converted into a brasier and was full of ashes and cinders.

When the servant-girl returned with Sandoval’s shirt and outer garments he got up in his drawers and began a search amidst his papers for a cake of soap, finally locating it. He washed himself in the basin of the washstand, which was brimming with dirty water wherein swam wisps of woman’s hair.

“Would you mind throwing out the water?” asked the journalist humbly of the maid.

“Throw it out yourself,” she snarled, leaving the room.

Sandoval went out into the corridor in his drawers, basin in hand, then returned, washed, and began to dress.

Here and there on the books lay a grimy comb, a broken toothbrush reddened with blood from gums, a collar edged with dirt, a rice-powder box full of dents with the puff black and hardened.

After Sandoval had dressed he became transformed in Manuel’s eyes; he took on an air of distinction and elegance. He wrote the letter that was asked of him, whereupon Roberto and Manuel left the house.

“He’s in there cursing away at us,” commented Roberto.

“Why?”

“Because he’s as lazy as a Turk. He’ll forgive anything except being made to work.”

Again they found themselves on the Calle de San Bernardo, and entered a lane that cut across. They paused before a tiny structure that jutted out from the line of the other buildings.

“This is the printing-shop,” said Roberto.

Manuel looked about him. Not a sign, no lettering, no indication whatsoever that this was a printery. Roberto thrust aside a little gate and they walked into a gloomy cellar that received its scanty light through the doorway leading to a dank, dirty patio. A recently whitewashed partition that bore the imprints of fingers and entire hands divided this basement into two compartments. In the first were packed a heap of dustladen objects; the other, the inner one, seemed to have been varnished black; a window gave it light; nearby rose a narrow, slippery stairway that disappeared into the ceiling. In the middle of this second compartment a bearded fellow, dark and thin, was mounted beside a large press, placing the paper, which there appeared as white as snow, over the bed of the machine; another man was receiving it. In a corner the oil motor that supplied the power to the press was toiling painfully on.

Manuel and Roberto climbed the stairway to a long, narrow room which received light through two windows that looked into the patio.

Against the wall of the room, and in the middle as well, stood the printer’s cases, over which hung several electric lights wrapped in newspaper cones that served as shades.

Three men and a boy were at work before the cases; one of the men, a lame fellow in a long blue smock, a derby, with a sour face and spectacles on his nose, was pacing up and down the room.

Roberto greeted the lame fellow and handed him Sandoval’s letter. The man took the letter and growled ill-naturedly:

“I don’t know why they come to me with matters of this kind. Damn it all!...”

“This is the youngster who is to learn the trade,” interrupted Roberto, coldly.

“Learn hell ...” and the cripple spat out ten or a dozen curses and a string of blasphemies.

“Are you in bad humor today?”

“I’m as I darn please.... This cursed daily grind.... It drives me to desperation.... Understand?”

“Indeed, I do,” replied Roberto, adding, in a stage “aside” such as is heard by the entire auditorium, “What patience one requires with this animal!”

“This is certainly a joke,” continued the cripple, unheedful of the “aside.” “Suppose the kid does want to learn the trade. What’s that got to do with me? And suppose he has nothing to eat? How does that concern me? Let him go to the deuce out of here ... and good riddance.”

“Are you going to teach him or not, SeÑor SÁnchez? I’m a busy man and have no time to waste.”

“Ah! No time to waste! Then clear out, my fine fellow. I don’t need you here at all. Let the kid remain. You’re in the way here.”

“Thanks. You stay here,” said Roberto to Manuel. “They’ll tell you what you have to do.”

Manuel stood perplexed; he saw his friend disappear, looked around him in every direction, and seeing that nobody paid any attention to him, he walked over to the stairway and descended two steps.

“Eh! Where are you going?” shouted the lame man after him. “Do you want to learn the trade or not? What do you call this?”

Manuel was more confused than ever.

“Hey, you, Yaco,” shouted the cripple, turning to one of the men at the cases. “Teach this kid the case.”

The man he had called,—a puny fellow, very swarthy, with a black beard,—was working away with astonishing rapidity. He cast an indifferent glance in Manuel’s direction and resumed his work.

The youngster stood there motionless. Seeing him thus, the other typesetter, a blond young fellow with a sickly look, turned to his bearded companion jestingly and said to him in a queer sing-song:

“Ah, Yaco! Why don’t you teach the boy the position of the letters?”

“Teach him yourself,” retorted he whom they called Yaco.

“Ah, Yaco, I see that the law of Moses makes you people very selfish, Yaco. You don’t want to waste any time, do you, Yaco?”

The bearded compositor glared at his companion with a sinister look; the blond fellow burst into laughter and then showed Manuel where the various letters of the alphabet were to be found; then he brought over a column of used type which he had drawn quickly from an iron form, and said:

“Now you’re to distribute every letter back into its proper box.”

Manuel began the task at an exceedingly slow pace.

The blond compositor wore a long blue smock and a derby perched on one side of his head. Bent over the case, his eyes very close to his copy, with his composing-stick in his left hand, he set up one line after the other with astonishing speed; his right hand leaped dizzyingly from box to box.

Often he would pause to light a cigarette, look at his bearded companion and in a very jovial tone ask him a question,—either a very silly one or such as admits of no possible reply,—to which the other man answered only with a sinister glance from his black eyes.

It struck twelve; everybody ceased working and went out. Manuel was left alone in the shop. At first he had harbored the hope that he would be given something to eat; then he came to the realization that nobody had given himself any concern as to his food. He reconnoitred the place; nothing in the premises, unfortunately, was edible; he wondered whether, if he were to remove the ink from the surface of the rollers, they would be palatable, but he arrived at no decision.

Yaco returned at two; shortly after came the blond young man, whose name was JesÚs, and the work was resumed. Manuel continued distributing the type, and JesÚs and Yaco, setting.

The cripple corrected galleys, inked them, drew proof by placing paper on them and striking it with a mallet, after which, with a pair of tweezers, he would extract certain letters and replace them with others.

At midafternoon JesÚs quit setting type and changed work. He took the galleys, which were tied around with twine, loosened them, shaped them into columns, placed them in an iron chase and locked them with quoins.

The form was carried off by one of the pressmen of the basement who returned with it inside of an hour. JesÚs replaced some of the columns with others and the form was again removed. Shortly afterward the same operation was repeated.

After working away until seven the men were about to leave, when Manuel went over to JesÚs and asked:

“Won’t the boss give me anything to eat?”

“Ho! The idea!”

“I haven’t any money; I didn’t even have any breakfast.”

“You didn’t? See here. Come along with me.”

They left the printing-shop together and entered a hovel on the Calle de Silva, where JesÚs ate. The blond young man engaged in conversation with the proprietor and then came over to Manuel, saying:

“You’ll get your meals here on tick. I’ve told him I’ll be responsible for you. Now see to it that you don’t be up to any knavish tricks.”

“Don’t worry.”

“Very good. Let’s go inside. It’s my treat today.”

They walked into the dining-room of the shack and sat down before a table.

The waiter brought them a platter of bread, stew and wine. As they ate, JesÚs recounted in humorous fashion a number of anecdotes relating to the proprietor of the printing-shop, to the journalists, and, above all, to Yaco, the fellow with the beard, who was a Jew, a very good fellow, but as stingy and sordid as they come.

JesÚs would banter him and provoke him just for the sake of listening to his rejoinders.

When they had finished their supper, JesÚs asked Manuel:

“Have you a place to sleep?”

“No.”

“There must be some corner in the printing-shop.”

They returned to the shop and the compositor asked the cripple to let Manuel sleep in some corner.

“Damn it all!” exclaimed the cripple, “this is going to become a regular Mountain Shelter. Such a band of ragamuffins! The lame fellow may be an ill-humoured cuss but everybody comes here just the same. You bet.”

Grumbling, as was his wont, the cripple opened a dingy sty that was reached by ascending several stairways; it was cluttered with engravings wrapped in sheets. He pointed to a corner where some excelsior and a few old cloaks were heaped.

Manuel slept like a prince in this hole.

On the next day the owner sent him down to the basement.

“Just watch what this fellow is doing, and you do the same,” he instructed, pointing to the thin, bearded man who stood on the platform of the press.

The man was taking a sheet of paper from a pile and placing it upon the feed board; at once the grippers reached forward and seized the sheet with the certainty of fingers; at a movement of the wheel the machine would swallow the paper and within a moment the sheet would issue, printed on one side, and some small sticks, like the ribs of a fan, would deposit it upon the fly table. Manuel very soon acquired the necessary skill.

The proprietor arranged that Manuel should work mornings at the cases, and afternoons and part of the night at the press, paying him for this a daily wage of six reales. During the afternoons it was fairly possible to stand the toil in the cellar; at night it was beyond endurance. Between the gasoline motor and the oil lamps the air was asphyxiating.

After a week in the place, Manuel had become intimate with JesÚs and Yaco.

JesÚs advised Manuel to apply himself to the cases and learn as soon as possible how to set type.

“At least you’ll be sure of making a living.”

“But it’s very hard,” said Manuel.

“Bah, man. Once you get used to it, it’s far easier than rolling off a log.”

Manuel worked away at the cases whenever he could, trying his best to acquire speed; some nights he actually set up lines, and how proud it made him afterward to see them in print!

JesÚs amused himself by teasing the Jew, mimicking his manner of speech. They had both been living for some months in the same tenement, Yaco (his real name was Jacob) with his family and JesÚs with his two sisters.

JesÚs delighted to drive Jacob out of all patience and hear him utter picturesque maledictions in his soft, mellifluous language with its long-drawn s’s.

According to JesÚs, at Jacob’s home his wife, his father-in-law and he himself spoke the weirdest jargon imaginable,—a mixture of Arabic and archaic Spanish that sounded exceedingly rare.

“Do you remember, Yaco,” JesÚs would ask, imitating the Jew’s pronunciation, “when you brought your wife, Mesoda, that canary? And she asked you: ‘Ah, Yaco, what sort of bird is this with yellow wings?’ And you answered her: ‘Ah, Mesoda! This bird is a canary and I have brought it for you.’”

Jacob, seeing everybody laugh at him, would cast a terrible glance at JesÚs and cry out:

“Wretch that you are! May you be struck by a dart that blots out your name from the book of the living!”

“And when Mesoda said to you,” continued JesÚs, “‘Stay here, Yaco, stay with me. Ah, Yaco, how ill I am! I have a dove in my heart, a hammer on each breast and a fish on my neck. Call my baba; have her bring me a twig of letuario, Yaco!’”

These domestic intimacies, thus treated in jest, exasperated Jacob; hearing them, he lost his temper completely and his imprecations outdistanced those of Camilla.

“You have no respect for the family, you dog,” he would conclude.

“The family!” JesÚs would retort. “The first thing a fellow should do is forget it. Parents, brothers and sisters, uncles, aunts and cousins,—what are they all but a botheration? The first thing a man should learn is to disobey his parents and have no belief in God.”

“Silence, you infidel, silence! May your sides fill up with watery vapor and your heart be consumed with fire. May the black broom sweep you off if you continue such blasphemies.”

JesÚs would greet these curses with laughter, and after having allowed Jacob to vent his wrath, would add:

“A couple of thousand years ago, this animal who’s nothing but a printer today would have been a prophet, and would be in the Bible together with Matthew, Zabulon and all that small fry.”

“Don’t talk nonsense,” snarled Jacob.

When the discussion was over, JesÚs would say to him:

“You know very well, Yaco, that a chasm yawns between your ideas and mine; but despite all that, if you’ll accept the invitation of a Christian, I invite you to a glass.”

Jacob would nod acceptance.

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CHAPTER II

The Names of the “Toads”—The Director of Los Debates and His Editorial Staff

SÁnchez GÓmez the printer, who was also known by the nickname Plancheta, was a wealthy man, though he toiled away daily like a common workman. He was a person of diabolically uneven temper, of corrosive joviality and, at bottom, good-hearted.

He was the most picturesque and versatile printer in Madrid, and his business was likewise the most complicated and interesting.

One thing alone was sufficient to give the measure of the man: with a single press, run by a gasoline engine of the old type, he published nine newspapers, the titles of which no one could call insignificant.

Los Debates (Debates); El Porvenir (The Future); La NaciÓn (The Nation); La Tarde (Afternoon); El Radical (The Radical); La MaÑana (Morning); El Mundo (The World); El Tiempo (The Times); and La Prensa (The Press); all these important dailies were born in the basement of the printery. To any ordinary man this would appear impossible; for SÁnchez GÓmez, that Proteus of Typography, the word impossible existed only in the dictionary.

Each of these important newspapers had a column of its own; all the rest, news, literary articles, advertisements, feuilletons, announcements, was common to them all.

SÁnchez GÓmez, in his newspapers, paired individualism and collectivism. Each of his organs enjoyed absolute autonomy and independence, and yet, each resembled the other as closely as two drops of water. The lame fellow thus realized in his publications unity and variety.

El Radical, for example, a rabidly Republican paper, devoted its first column to attacking the Government and the priesthood; but its news items were the same as those of El Mundo, an impenitently conservative daily which employed its first column in defense of the church, that Holy Ark of our traditions; the Monarchy, that glorious institution, symbol of our Fatherland; the Army, most powerful bulwark of our nationality; the Constitution, that compendium of our public liberties....

Of all the newspapers printed there, Los Debates alone constituted a profitable venture for its proprietor, Don Pedro Sampayo y SÁnchez del Pelgar. Los Debates—using the figures of speech employed in the daily—was a terrible battering-ram against the purse of the politicians, an inexpugnable fortress for the needs of the creditors.

Blackmail, in the hands of the newspaper director, was converted into a terrible weapon; neither the ancient catapult nor the modern cannon could be compared with it.

The newspaper owned by Don Pedro Sampayo y SÁnchez del Pelgar had three columns of its own.

These columns were written by a huge, thick-set Galician of most uncouth appearance, named GonzÁlez Parla, who wielded a pen that went straight to the point, and by a certain SeÑor Fresneda, as thin as a rail, exceedingly delicate, well dressed and always starving.

LangairiÑos, the Superman, was on the staff of Los Debates, but only as an aliquot part, since his works of genius were printed in the nine toads that were born daily in SÁnchez GÓmez’s printery.

It is high time that we introduced LangairiÑos. The newspaper-men called him Superman in jest,—Super for short—, because he was forever prating about the coming of Nietzsche’s superman; they did not realize that, jest or no jest, they but did him justice.

He was the highest, the loftiest of the editorial staff; sometimes he signed himself MÁximo, at others, MÍnimo; but his name,—his real name, that which he immortalized daily, and increasingly every day, in Los Debates, or in El Tiempo, El Mundo or El Radical, was Ernesto LangairiÑos.

LangairiÑos! A sweet, sonorous name, somewhat like a cool zephyr in a summer twilight. LangairiÑos! A dream.

The great LangairiÑos was between thirty and forty; a pronounced abdomen, aquiline nose and a strong, thick black beard.

One of the imbeciles among his enemies, seeing him so vertebrate and cerebral,—one of those vipers who try to sink their fangs into the armour of great personalities,—asseverated that LangairiÑos’s appearance was grotesque. A false statement whichever way you look at it, for, despite the fact that his attire did not respond to the requirements of the most foppish dandyism; despite the fact that his trousers were always baggy and frayed, and his sack-coats studded with constellations of stains; despite all this, his natural elegance, his air of superiority and distinction erased these minor imperfections, even as the waves of the sea wipe out tracks upon the sand of the beach.

LangairiÑos practised criticism, and a cruel criticism it was. His articles appeared simultaneously in nine newspapers. His impressionistic manner scorned such banal phrases as “La SeÑorita PÉrez rose to great heights,” “the characters of the work are well sustained,” and others of the same class.

In two apothegms the Superman concentrated all his ideas as to the world that surrounded him. They were two terrible sentences, in a bitter, lacerating style. If any one asserted that such and such a politician or journalist had influence, money or ability, he would reply: “Yes, yes, I know whom you mean.” And if another announced that a certain novelist or dramatist was at work upon a new book or piece, or had just finished one, he would answer: “Very good; very good. Through the other door.”

LangairiÑos’s superior type of mind did not permit him to suppose that any man other than himself could be any better than another.

His masterpiece was an article entitled “They’re All Ragamuffins.” It was a conversation between a master of journalism—himself—and a cub reporter.

This avalanche of Attic salt concluded with the following gem of humour:

The Cub Reporter: One must have principles.

The Master: At table.

The Cub Reporter: The country should be told things straight from the shoulder.

The Master: It would get indigestion. Remember the boarding-house peas.

That was the Superman’s regular style, a terrible, Shakesperian manner.

As a result of the cerebral exhaustion produced by these intellectual labours, the Super was troubled with neurasthenia, and as a cure for his ailment he took glycerophosphate of lime with his meals and did gymnastics.

Manuel recalled having often heard in DoÑa Casiana’s boarding-house a sonorous voice bravely and untiringly counting the number of leg and arm flexions. Twenty-five ... twenty-six ... twenty-seven, until a hundred or more was reached. That Bayard of Callisthenics was none other than LangairiÑos.

The other two editors could not be likened unto LangairiÑos. GonzÁlez Parla, with that porter’s face of his, looked like a barbarian. He was brutally frank; he called a spade a spade, politicians leeches and the newspapers printed by SÁnchez GÓmez, the toads.

The other editor, Fresneda, outrivalled in finesse the most tactful and effeminate man that could be found in Madrid. He experienced a veritable delight in calling everybody SeÑor. Fresneda managed only by a miracle to keep alive. He spent his whole life starving, yet this roused no wrath in his soul.

In order to get Sampayo, proprietor of Los Debates, to pay them a few pesetas, GonzÁlez Parla and Fresneda were compelled to resort to all manner of expedients. The hope harbored by the pair, which was a credential obtained through the proprietary director, was never realized.

Manuel had heard so much talk about Sampayo that he was curious to make his acquaintance.

He was a tall, erect gentleman, of noble appearance, about sixty-odd years old; various times he had filled the office of Governor, thanks to his wife, a fine-looking female who in her halcyon days had been able to wheedle anything out of a Minister. Wherever this couple had passed through in the course of the husband’s official duties, not a nail was left in the wall.

Sampayo’s wife was very friendly with certain wealthy gentlemen, but in just reciprocity, so super-womanly and tolerant she was, she always picked out good-looking, obliging maids, so that her husband should have no cause for complaint.

And what a human spectacle their home presented! At times, when SeÑora de Sampayo returned somewhat weary after one of her little adventures, she would find her noble-looking husband dining hand in hand with the maid, if not embracing her tenderly.

The couple squandered their entire income; but Sampayo was so skilful in the art of making creditors and then fighting them off, that they always managed to raise a few coins.

Once when GonzÁlez Parla, who was in an ugly mood, and Fresneda, as amiable as ever, called on Sampayo, addressing him every other moment as the Director SeÑor Sampayo, and explained to him the dire straits in which they found themselves, the director gave Fresneda a letter to a South American general, asking for some money. Sampayo imposed upon his editor the condition that all over ten duros should go to the newspaper cash-box.

When the two editors reached the street, GonzÁlez Parla asked his companion for the letter, and the spectral journalist handed it to him.

“I’ll go to see this knave of a general,” promised GonzÁlez Parla, “and I’ll get the money from him. Then we’ll divide it. Half for you and the other half for me.”

The skinny editor accompanied the corpulent to the general’s house.

The general, a little Mexican, dressed like a macaw, read the director’s letter, looked at the journalist, readjusted his spectacles and eyed him from top to bottom, asking:

“Are you SeÑÓ Fresneda?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course. I’m the man.”

“But you’re consumptive, aren’t you?”

“I? No, sir.”

“Well, that’s what they tell me in this letter, understand?... That you have seven children and that from your looks I can understand that you’re in the final stage of consumption, see?”

GonzÁlez Parla was non-plussed. He confessed that it was true he did not have consumption; but he had had a consumptive father, and since his father had suffered from tuberculosis, the doctors had told him that he, too, would contract it,—that, indeed, he was already in the early stages, so that if he were as yet not really consumptive, it was almost the same as if he were.

“I don’t understand all this, see?” said the general, after listening to so defective an explanation. “I do gather, though, that this is a hoax. How can a fellow be so fat and yet be sick, hey? But, anyway,” and he handed out a bill folded between his fingers, “take this and be off with you, and don’t be such a faker.”

“This corpulency is misleading,” replied GonzÁlez Parla humbly, accepting the bill. “It’s due to all the potatoes I eat.” And he disappeared in shame, as fast as he could.

The note was for a hundred pesetas, and the skinny editor divided it with the corpulent, to the great indignation of Sampayo. The director vowed that he would not pay them a cÉntimo for months and months.

Once, Fresneda reduced to the final gasps of hunger, uttered the sole energetic sentence of his entire career.

“I’ll write you a recommendation to the Ministry,” the director had said to him, in answer to a request for money.

“To die of hunger, SeÑor de Sampayo,” Fresneda had replied, with a flash of independence not devoid of his proverbial finesse, “one does not require letters of recommendation.”

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CHAPTER III

The Santa Casilda Hostelry—Jacob’s History—La Fea and La Sinforosa—The Motherless Child—A not Very Merry Christmas

By the time spring came around Manuel was setting type with ease. Somewhat later, the third compositor left, and JesÚs advised the boss to let Manuel fill the vacancy.

“But he doesn’t know anything,” replied the owner.

“What need he know? Pay him by the line.”

“No. I’ll raise his daily wage.”

“How much are you going to give him?”

“Eight reales.”

“That’s too little. The other fellow got twelve.”

“Very well. I’ll give him nine. But let him not come here to sleep.”

Manuel’s new position freed him from the duty of sweeping the shop. He abandoned the sty in which he had been sleeping. JesÚs took him to the Santa Casilda hostelry, where he himself stayed; it was a huge, one-story structure with three very large patios, situated on the Ronda de Toledo. Manuel would have preferred not to return to this section, which was linked in his memory to so many unpleasant recollections; but his friendship with JesÚs won him over. He got, at the hostelry, for a fortnightly rent of eight reales, a tiny room with a bed, a broken reed chair and a mat hanging from the ceiling and serving as the door. When the wind blew from the direction of the fields of San Isidro, the rooms and the corridors of the Santa Casilda hostelry were filled with smoke. The patios of the place were more or less like those at Uncle Rilo’s house, with identical galleries and numbered doors.

From the window of Manuel’s den could be seen three red, round-paunched tanks of the gashouse, with their lofty iron girders that ended in pulleys at the top; round about was the Rastro; to one side, dumping-places blackened with coal and slag; farther on stretched the arid landscape, the yellow slopes of which climbed into the horizon. Directly before him rose the Los Ángeles hill with the hermitage on its crest.

In the very next room to that which Manuel occupied were a carpenter, his wife and a child. The couple would get drunk and beat the child unmercifully.

Many a time Manuel was on the point of bursting into the room, for it seemed to him that those beasts were torturing the little girl.

One morning, encountering the carpenter’s wife, he said to her:

“Why do you beat that poor little girl so?”

“Is it any of your business?”

“It certainly is.”

“Isn’t she my daughter? I can do what I please with her.”

“That’s what your mother should have done with you,” retorted Manuel. “Beat the life out of you for a witch.”

The woman grumbled something or other and Manuel went off to the printing-shop.

That night the carpenter stopped Manuel.

“What was it you said to my wife, eh?”

“I told her that she oughtn’t to beat her daughter.”

“And who told you to mix into this business?”

The carpenter was a ferocious-looking fellow with a wide, bulging space between his eyebrows, and a bull neck. His forehead was crossed by a swollen vein. Manuel made no reply.

Fortunately for him the carpenter and his wife soon moved from the place.

In the holes of the same corridor there lived also two aged gipsies together with their families, both exceedingly noisy and thievish; a blind maiden who sang gipsy songs in the streets, wiggling with epileptic convulsions, and who was accompanied by another lass with whom she was for ever fighting, and two very cheap, very slovenly sisters, with painted cheeks and loud voices,—a pair of lying, quarrelsome strumpets, but as happy as goats.

JesÚs’s room was near Manuel’s, and this life in common both at the printing-shop and at the house tightened the bonds of their friendship.

JesÚs was an excellent youth, but he got drunk with lamentable frequency. He had two maiden sisters, one a pretty chit with green cat’s eyes and an impudent face, called La Sinforosa, and the other a sickly creature, all twisted and scrofulous, whom everybody heartlessly called La Fea, ugly.

After they had been living thus for two months or so at the hostelry, JesÚs, in his peculiar, ironic tone, remarked one day to Manuel on the way to the shop:

“Did you hear? My sister is pregnant.”

“That so?”

“That’s what.”

“Which of the two?”

“La Fea. I wonder who the hero could have been. He deserves a cross of valour.”

The compositor continued to prattle about the misfortune, jesting upon it indifferently.

This did not appear very just to Manuel; after all, she was the man’s sister. But JesÚs launched forth with his invectives against the family, declaring that a fellow need not concern himself about his brothers and sisters, his parents, or anybody.

“A fine theory for egotists,” answered Manuel.

“Why, the family is nothing but egotism that favours a few as against humanity,” agreed JesÚs.

“Much you care about humanity. As little as for your family,” retorted Manuel.

This topic was the theme of a number of other discussions, in the heat of which they spoke some bitter, mortifying words to each other.

Manuel was not much concerned about the theoretical problem. What did fill him with indignation, however, was to see that JesÚs and La Sinforosa took no pity upon their sister, sending her on errands and making her sweep the place when the poor rachitic creature couldn’t stir because of her huge abdomen, which threatened to become monstrous. As a result of these altercations there were days on which Manuel exchanged scarcely two words with JesÚs, preferring to chat with Jacob and ask him questions about his native land.

Jacob, despite the fact that he was always lamenting the evil days he had suffered in his country, was fond of speaking about it.

He came from Fez and was wildly enthusiastic over that city.

He depicted it as a paradise flourishing with gardens, palm-trees, lemon and orange trees, and beribboned with crystalline streamlets. In Fez, in the Jewish quarter Jacob had passed his childhood, until he entered the service of a wealthy merchant who did business in Rabat, Mogador and Saffi.

With his lively imagination and his exaggerated speech, which was so picturesque and thronged with imagery, Jacob communicated an impression of reality whenever he spoke of his country.

He pictured the procession of the caravans composed of camels, asses and dromedaries. These last he described with their long necks and their small heads, swaying like those of serpents, with their dull eyes directed toward the sky. As one listened to him at the height of his evocations one imagined that one was crossing those white sands in the blinding sun. He described, too, the markets that were set up at the intersection of several roads and characterized the folk who came to them: the Moors of the nearby Kabyles, with their guns; the serpent charmers; the sorcerers; the tellers of tales from the Thousand And One Nights, the medicine men who draw worms from human ears.

And as the caravans departed, each proceeding on its different way, the men mounted on their horses and mules, Jacob would imitate the cawing of the crows that swooped down in flocks upon the market place and covered it with a black cloak.

He pictured the effect of beholding thirty or forty Berbers on horseback, with their flowing locks, armed with long muskets. As they passed a Jew they would spit upon the ground. He told of the uncertain life there; on the roads, earless, armless folk, victims of justice, begging alms in the name of Muley Edris; during the winter, the dangerous crossing of the rivers, the nights at the gates of the villages, while the cus-cus was being prepared, playing the guembrÍ and singing sad, drowsy airs.

One Sabbath Jacob invited Manuel to eat with him at his house.

The Jew lived in the Pozas section, in a ramshackle house on a lane near the Paseo de Areneros.

The tiny structure looked strange, somewhat Oriental. One or two low pine tables; small mats instead of chairs, and, hanging from the walls, coloured cloths and two small three-stringed guitars.

Manuel was introduced to Jacob’s father, a long-haired old fellow who walked about the house in a dark tunic and a cap, to his wife, Mesoda, and to a black-eyed child called Aisa.

They all sat down to table; the old man solemnly pronounced a number of words in an involved language, which Manuel took for some Hebrew prayer, and then they began to eat.

The meal had a taste of strong aromatic herbs and to Manuel it seemed that he was chewing flowers.

At table the old man, employing that extravagant Castilian in which the entire family spoke, recounted to Manuel the events of the African war. In his version Prim, or, as he referred to him, SeÑor Juan Prim, assumed epic proportions. Jacob must have respected the old man very deeply, for he allowed him to speak on and on about Prim and about the Almighty. Mesoda, who was very timid, only smiled, and blushed upon the slightest provocation.

After the meal Jacob took down from the wall one of the small three-stringed guitars and sang several Arabian songs, accompanying himself on the primitive instrument.

Manuel bid adieu to Jacob’s family and promised to visit them from time to time.

One autumn night, as Manuel was returning from work after a day during which JesÚs had not put in an appearance at the shop, he entered the hostelry to find in the corridor leading to his room a knot of women gossiping about JesÚs and his sisters.

La Fea had given birth; the doctor from the Emergency Hospital was in her room together with SeÑora Salomona, a kindly woman who made her living as a nurse.

“But what has JesÚs done?” asked Manuel, hearing the insults heaped upon the typesetter by the angry women.

“What has he done?” replied one of them. “Nothing at all, only it’s come out that he’s been living with La Sinfo, who’s the blackest of black sheep. JesÚs and she had taken to drink and that big fox of a Sinfo has been taking La Fea’s pay from her.”

“That can’t be true,” said Manuel.

“Is that so? Well, JesÚs himself was the one to tell it.”

“H’m. The other one isn’t any too decent herself when it comes to that,” interpolated one of the women.

“She’s as decent as the best of them,” retorted the spokeswoman. “She told everything to the doctor from the Emergency Hospital. One night when she hadn’t had a bite in her mouth, because JesÚs and La Sinfo had taken every cÉntimo from her, La Fea went and drank a drop of brandy to quiet her hunger; then she had another; she was so weak that she got drunk right away. In came La Sinfo and JesÚs, both stewed to the gills, and the shameless fox, seeing La Fea in bed, said to her, she says: ‘Out with you. We need the bed ourselves for ...’ and here she made an indecent gesture. You know what I mean. And she goes and shows her sister the door. La Fea, who was too tipsy to know what was going on, went into the street, and an officer, seeing how drunk she was, took her to the station and shoved her into a dark cell, where some tramp....”

“Who must have been drunk himself,” interjected a mason, who had paused to hear the story.

“So there you are ...” concluded the gossip.

“I’ll bet that if there had been light in the cell nothing would have happened, for the moment the guy caught sight of that face he would have turned sober with fright,” added the mason, continuing on his way.

Manuel left the gabbling women and stopped in the doorway of JesÚs’s room. It was a desolating spectacle. The typesetter’s sister, pale, with closed eyes, thrown across the floor on a few mats and covered with burlap, looked like a corpse. The doctor was bandaging her at that moment. SeÑora Salomona was dressing the newborn. A pool of blood stained the stone flooring.

JesÚs, leaning against the wall in a corner, was gazing impassibly at the doctor and his sister out of glittering eyes.

The physician requested the neighbours to fetch a quilt and a few sheets; when these articles had been brought they placed the quilt upon the mat and laid La Fea carefully into the improvised bed. The poor twisted creature looked like a skeleton; her breasts were as flat as a man’s, and though she had no strength to move, when they brought the child to her side she changed position and tried to suckle it.

Gazing upon this scene, Manuel glared angrily at JesÚs.

He could have beaten the typesetter with pleasure for having permitted his sister to come to this.

The physician, after having finished his task, took JesÚs over to the end of the gallery and engaged in private conversation with him. JesÚs was willing to do exactly as he was told; he would give every cÉntimo of his pay to La Fea, he promised.

Then, when the physician had left, JesÚs fell into the hands of the women, who made a rag of him.

He denied nothing. Quite the contrary.

“During her pregnancy,” he confessed, “she slept on the floor, on the mat.”

The chorus of women received the compositor’s words with indignation. He shrugged his shoulders stupidly.

“Just imagine the poor creature sleeping on the mat while La Sinfo and JesÚs lay in bed!” exclaimed one.

And higher and higher rose the indignation against La Sinfo, that shameless street-walker, whom they vowed to give an unmerciful drubbing. SeÑora Salomona had to interrupt their chatter, for it kept the woman in childbed awake.

La Sinfo must have suspected something, for she did not show up at the hostelry. JesÚs, frowning glumly, his cheeks aflame and his eyes aglitter, went on the following days from house to shop without a word. Manuel had a notion that the young man was in love with his sister.

During the period of her confinement the neighbours took affectionate care of La Fea. They demanded every cÉntimo of JesÚs’s pay, and he surrendered it without any resistance whatsoever.

The newborn child, emaciated and hydrocephalic, died within a week.

La Sinforosa never appeared there again. According to gossip she had gone into the profession.

The day before Christmas, toward evening, three gentleman dressed in black came to the place. One was a diminutive old fellow with white moustaches and merry eyes; the second was a stiff gentleman with a greying beard and gold-rimmed spectacles; the other appeared to be a secretary or a clerk, and was short, with black moustaches, burdened with documents and tapping his heels as he walked. It was said that they came from La Conferencia de San Vicente de Paul; they visited JesÚs’ sister and other persons who lived in the nooks and crannies of the house.

Behind these gentlemen attired in black went Manuel and JesÚs, who only slept at the hostelry and did not know the neighbourhood, so that they walked about their own place as strangers.

“Hypocrites!” cried the mason at the top of his voice.

“But, man. Hush!” exclaimed Manuel. “They might hear you.”

“And suppose they do?” retorted the neighbour. “Let them! They’re nothing but a gang of hypocrites. Who asks them to come here and pretend to be charitable souls? They come here to show off, to put on airs,—that’s what they come for. The mountebanks, the Jesuits! What in hell do they want to find out? That we live badly? That we’ve turned to swine? That we don’t attend to our children? That we get drunk? Very well. Let them give us their money and we’ll live better. But don’t let them come here with their certificates and their advice.”

The three visitors went into a hole a couple of metres square. On the floor, upon a litter of rags and straw, lay a dropsical woman with a swollen, silly face.

A young woman was seated in a chair, sewing by lamplight.

From the corridor Manuel could hear the conversation that was taking place inside.

The little old man with the white moustaches was asking in his merry voice what ailed the woman, and a neighbour who lived in an adjoining room was relating an endless tale of wretchedness and squalor.

The dropsical woman bore her woes with extraordinary resignation.

Misfortune battened upon her and she sank lower and lower until she reached this doleful position. She could not find a friendly hand, and her sole benefactors had been a butcher and his wife, former servants of hers in better days whom she had helped to set up in business. The butcher’s wife, who was also a moneylender, used to purchase cloaks and Manila handkerchiefs in the Rastro, and when there was anything to mend or to put into order she would bring it to the invalid’s daughter for repair.

This service the former servant rewarded by giving the daughter of her mistress a heap of bones, and, at times, when she was particularly pleased with a piece of work, by presenting her with the remainders of a meal.

“A hell of a generous lady, the butcher’s wife!” commented the mason, who had listened to the neighbour’s story.

“Even the common folk,” replied JesÚs jestingly, recalling a zarzuela refrain, “has its tender heart.”

The gentlemen from La Conferencia de Paul, after having heard so moving an account, gave three food tickets to the dropsical woman and left the room.

“Now the woman’s happy,” muttered JesÚs, ironically. “She was going to die tomorrow and now she can last until the day after. What more does she want?”

“I should say,” chimed the mason.

The secretary,—the fellow burdened with so many documents, recalled a case similar to that of the dropsical woman, and he declared that it was most curious and extremely interesting.

As the three gentlemen were turning down one corridor to go into another, an old lady approached them, addressing them as “Your grace,” and asking them to accompany her. She led the way with a candle to a garret, or, more exactly speaking, a dark nook beneath a staircase. On a heap of rags, wrapped in a frayed cloak, lay an emaciated, filthy little girl, her face dark and wan, her eyes black, shy and glittering. At her side slept a little boy of two or three.

“I wish Your grace would place this little girl in an asylum,” said the old woman. “She’s an orphan; her mother, who—begging your pardon—did not lead a very good life, died here. She’s planted herself in this hole and nobody can make her stir. She steals eggs, bread, whatever she can lay her hands upon, sometimes in one house, sometimes in another, so that she can feed the baby. I wish you could see that she’s placed in an asylum.”

The little girl stared out of her large eyes, frightened at sight of the three gentlemen, and seized the infant by the hand.

“This little girl,” declared the secretary from behind his bundle of documents, “has a genuinely curious affection for her tiny brother, and I am not sure that it would not be cruel to separate them.”

“An asylum would be better,” insisted the old woman.

“We’ll see. We’ll see,” replied the old gentleman. The trio took their departure.

“What’s your name?” asked JesÚs of the girl.

“Me? Salvadora.”

“Do you want to come and live with me, together with your little brother?”

“Yes,” replied the lass, without a moment’s hesitation.

“Very well, then, let’s be going. Get up. La Fea will be happy to have them,” said JesÚs, as if to give an explanation of his impulse. “Otherwise they’ll separate this little girl from her brother, and that would be an outrage.”

The lass took the babe in her arms and followed JesÚs. La Fea must have received the two forsaken children with intense enthusiasm. Manuel was not present, for a young man had stopped him in the corridor.

“Don’t you know me?” he asked directly in front of Manuel.

“Of course, man.... You’re El AristÓn.”

“That’s me.”

“Do you live here?”

“Over in El Corral.”

El Corral was one of the patios of the hostelry, and opened upon that pestilential Rastro which extends from La Ronda to the gashouse. El AristÓn was as full of necromania as ever. He spoke to Manuel only of deaths, burials and funereal matters.

He told Manuel that on Sundays he visited burial grounds; for he considered it a duty to fulfil that merciful work which bids one to bury the dead.

During the course of the conversation the necromaniac insinuated the notion that if the king were to die they could make a wonderful interment; but despite this, he imagined that the burial of the Pope would be even more sumptuous.

The necromaniac and Manuel passed through several corridors.

“Where are you taking me?” asked Manuel.

“If you want to come, you can see a corpse.”

“And what are you going to do with this corpse?”

“I’m going to watch over him and pray for him,” replied El AristÓn.

In a tiny room lighted by two candles stuck in the necks of bottles, there was a dead man stretched out on a mattress....

From afar came the sound of tambourines and songs; from time to time the shrill voice of some drunken old hag would shout:

In the room where the dead man lay, there was, at that moment, nobody.

CHAPTER IV

Roberto’s Christmas—Northern Folk.

At this same hour Roberto Hasting, wrapped in his overcoat, was on his way to Bernardo SantÍn’s home. The night was cold; hardly a person was to be seen on the street; the tramcars glided hurriedly over the rails with a gentle drone.

Roberto entered the house, climbed to the top story and knocked. Esther opened the door and he walked in.

“Where’s Bernardo?” asked Roberto.

“He hasn’t appeared all day,” answered the ex-teacher.

“No?”

“No.”

Esther, huddled into a shawl, sat down before the table. The room, formerly the photographer’s gallery, was lighted by an oil lamp. Everything bore witness to the direst poverty.

“Have they taken away the camera?” asked Roberto.

“Yes. This morning. I have my money locked in this chest. What would you advise me to do, Roberto?”

Roberto strode up and down the room with his eyes fixed upon the floor. All at once he drew up before Esther.

“Do you wish me to be perfectly frank with you?”

“Yes. Perfectly. Just as you’d speak to a good friend.”

“Very well, then. I believe that what you ought to do is—. I don’t know whether the advice will strike you as brutal....”

“Go on....”

“What I believe is that you ought to get a separation from your husband.”

Esther was silent.

“You’ve fallen into the hands, not of a knave nor of a beast, but of an unfortunate, a poor imbecile, without talent, without energy, incapable alike of living or of appreciating you.”

“What am I to do?”

“What? Return to your old life,—to your piano and English lessons. Would the separation grieve you?”

“No. Quite the contrary. Take my word for it: I haven’t the slightest affection for Bernardo. He fills me with pity and aversion. What’s more, I never cared for him.”

“Then why did you marry him?”

“How do I know? Fate, the treacherous advice of a friend, ignorance of his real character. It was one of those things that are done without knowing why. The very next day I was remorseful.”

“I can imagine. When I learned that Bernardo was to be married, I thought to myself: ‘It must be some adventuress who wishes to legalize her situation with a man.’ Then, when I got to know you, I asked myself: ‘How could this woman have been deceived by so insignificant a creature as Bernardo? There’s no explanation. No money, no talent, no industry. Whatever could have impelled an educated woman, a woman of feeling, to marry such a dolt?’ I have never been able to explain it since. Could you possibly have divined an artist in him,—or a man who, though poor, was willing to work and struggle?”

“No. They put all that into my head. To understand my decision you’d have to let me tell you the story of my life, ever since I reached Madrid with my mother. We lived modestly on a small pension that a relation sent us from Paris. I had completed my studies at the Conservatory and was looking for pupils. I had two or three for the piano, and one for English, and these brought me in sufficient for my expenses. It was under these circumstances that my mother fell ill; I lost my pupils because all my time was taken up by caring for her, and soon found myself in a most distressing situation. Then when she died I was left alone in a boarding-house, besieged by men who pestered me at all hours with shameful proposals. I tramped the streets in search of a position as teacher. I was truly in despair. You may well believe that there were days when I was tempted to commit suicide, to plunge into an evil life, to embrace any desperate measure so as to have done with all this brooding. While in this state I read one day in a newspaper that an English lady staying at the Hotel de Paris desired a young lady companion who had a good knowledge of Spanish and English. I go to the hotel, I wait for the lady and she receives me with open arms and treats me like a sister. You can understand my satisfaction and gratitude. I have never been an ingrate; if at that time my benefactress had asked for my life, I would have surrendered it with pleasure. You may take my word for that. This lady was an enthusiastic student of painting and used to go to the Museo; I accompanied her. Among those who copied at the Museo was a young German, tall, fair, and a friend of my employer. He began to make love to me. He struck me as swell-headed and not very agreeable. When my benefactress noticed that the painter was courting me, she was very much put out and told me that he was a low fellow, a cynical beast; she drew me a most horrible picture of him, depicting him as a depraved egotist. I felt no great sympathy for the German in the first place, so I heeded my protector’s words and showed my scorn for the painter quite openly. Despite this, however, Oswald—that was his name—persisted in his attentions. It was at this juncture that Bernardo appeared. I think he knew the German somewhat, and one day he spoke to my employer and me. And now, without my being aware of what was going on, my benefactress began tactics contrary to those she had employed in the case of Oswald. She praised Bernardo to the skies at every least opportunity; she said he was a great artist, a man of superior talents, of exquisite sensibility with a heart of gold; she told me that he adored me. Indeed, I received enchanting love letters from him, filled with delicate sentiments that moved me. My benefactress facilitated our meetings; she urged me to this unfortunate marriage, and as soon as I was wed she left Madrid. Two or three weeks after the ceremony, Bernardo confessed to me with a laugh that all the letters he had written to me had been dictated to him by Fanny.”

“Fanny, you say?”

“Yes. Do you know her?”

“I think I do.”

“She was in love with Oswald herself. To keep Oswald from courting me she had committed a heartless treachery. After saving me from poverty, she cast me into a situation even worse than what she had rescued me from. She abused the blind confidence I had in her. But I’ll have my revenge; yes, I’ll have my revenge. Fanny is here with Oswald. I’ve seen them. I have written to him, making an appointment for tomorrow.”

“That was a mistake, Esther.”

“Why? Is that the way to play with a person’s life?”

“But what will you gain by this?”

“Revenge. Does that seem little?”

“Very little. If you’ve retained some affection for Oswald, that’s a different matter.”

“No, not a bit. I don’t care for him. But I won’t let Fanny get off without punishment for her perfidy.”

“And would you go as far as adultery to get your revenge?”

“Who told you that it would go as far as adultery? Besides, in me it would be a right, not a lapse.”

“What’s more, you’d make Oswald very unhappy?’

“Haven’t they made me unhappy?”

Esther was in the grip of passionate excitement.

“Do you think Oswald will come to this house tomorrow?” asked Roberto.

“I certainly do.”

“This benefactress of yours,—is she tall, thin, with grey eyes?”

“Yes!”

“Then it’s my cousin.”

“Your cousin?”

“Yes. I warn you, she’s a very violent woman.”

“I know that.”

“She’s capable of attacking you anywhere.”

“I know that, too.”

“Have you considered your resolution calmly? As you will readily understand,—a man to whom a woman writes making an appointment, and to whom she says: ‘If I did not respond to your attentions it was because they deceived me about you, and told me that you were many things that you were not,’—such a man cannot resign himself to listening tranquilly to such a confession.”

“What is he going to do about it?”

“He will look for satisfaction. No one consents to being the mere, passive instrument of another’s vengeance. You will ruin this man’s peace of mind.”

“Didn’t they ruin mine?”

“Yes. But wreaking vengeance for Fanny’s treachery on her lover doesn’t strike me as just.”

“That doesn’t matter to me. One thing alone would make me forgo my revenge.”

“What?”

“The fact that it might harm you in any way. You have been good to me,” murmured Esther, blushing.

“No, you can’t harm me in any way. But you could harm yourself. Fanny has a horrible temper.”

“Would you care to come here tomorrow?”

“I? Why, what right have I to meddle?”

“Aren’t you a friend of mine?”

“Yes.”

“Then come.”

Roberto did come the following afternoon. Bernardo was, as usual, not at home. Esther was highly excited. Oswald arrived at four. He was a blond young man, with reddish eyes, very tall and long-haired. He seemed to suffer an intense disappointment at finding Roberto alone. They conversed. To Roberto, Oswald appeared to be an insufferable pedant. He took the floor to say, in professorial tones, that he could not endure either the Spaniards or the French. He was going to write a book, entitled The Anti-Latin, in which he would consider the Latin peoples as degenerates who should be conquered by the Germans, the sooner the better. He boiled with indignation because folks spoke of France. France did not exist. France had accomplished nothing. France had erected around itself a Chinese wall. As BjÖrnson had said, a long time before, the world’s greatest composer was Wagner; the greatest dramatist, Ibsen; the greatest novelist, Tolstoi; the greatest painter, BÖcklin; yet in France they continued to speak of Sardou, Mirbeau, and other similar imbeciles. The original writers of Paris plagiarized Nietzsche; the Latin composers had copied and ransacked the Germans; French science did not exist; France had neither philosophy nor art. France’s historic achievement was a complete illusion. The whole Latin race was a matter for scorn.

Roberto made no answer to this diatribe, but scrutinized Oswald closely instead. This huge pedant of a fellow struck him as so absurd. A woman had made an appointment with him and here he was babbling sociology!

Esther came in. The German saluted her very gravely, and asked her in an aside the reason for this appointment. Esther said nothing. Roberto tactfully left the studio and began to stride up and down the corridor.

“Does Fanny know now that you’ve come here?” asked Esther of Oswald.

“Yes, I think she does.”

“I’m glad of that.”

“Why?”

“Because then she’ll come, too.”

“Has she anything to do with this affair?”

“Yes. Has she been living with you for some time?”

“Yes, for some time.”

They were both silent for a period, mute in so embarrassing a situation. All at once there came the sound of the bell being tugged violently.

“Here she comes,” said Esther, opening the door.

Fanny rushed into the studio. She was pale and upset.

“Weren’t you expecting me?” she asked Esther.

“Yes. I knew that you would come.”

“What do you want of Oswald?”

“Nothing. I want to tell him what sort of woman you are; I want to inform him about your treachery, that’s all. You committed against me, who trusted you as if you were my mother, a vile crime. You betrayed me. You told me that Oswald had seduced a woman and then abandoned her.”

“I!” exclaimed the painter, astounded.

“Yes, you. That’s what she told me. She told me also that you were an insignificant painter, utterly lacking in talent.”

Fanny, stupefied, taken unawares, could not say a word.

“During the time in which you and I were friends,” Esther continued, turning to Oswald, “she never missed an opportunity to speak ill of you, to insult you. She said that you were trying to seduce me; she painted you as a wicked wretch, a beast, a repugnant creature....”

“You lie! You lie!” shrieked Fanny in a high-pitched voice.

“I am telling the truth, and only the truth. At that time I believed your advice was for my good,—dictated by the affection you felt for me. Afterward I realized that you had been guilty of the vilest perfidy,—the most iniquitous that can be committed, taking advantage of the influence you wielded over me.”

“But you wrote me a letter,” interposed Oswald.

“Not I.”

“Yes, indeed. A letter in which you replied to my protestations with cruel jests.”

“No. I didn’t write that letter. Fanny must have forged it. She wanted to keep you away from me at all costs.”

“Oh, you have ruined my life!” cried Oswald with wild emphasis, falling into a chair near the table and bowing his head upon his hand. Then he rose from his seat and began to pace from one side of the room to the other.

“This is the truth, the pure truth,” affirmed Esther. “And I wanted you to know it, to hear it in her presence, so that she could deny nothing. She made my life unhappy, but she shall not enjoy her perfidy in peace.”

“You have ruined my life!” repeated Oswald in his emphatic tone.

“She. It was she.”

“I’ll kill you!” howled Fanny in a hoarse voice, seizing Esther by the arms.

“But you know now that what she told you about me was a lie, don’t you?” asked Oswald.

“Yes.”

“Then, will you listen to me now?”

“Now? Ha, ha!” laughed Fanny. “Now she has a lover.”

“Not at all!” cried Esther.

“Yes you have. He comes here every day to see you. He’s a blond. You can’t deny it.”

“Ah! He was in here a moment ago,” said Oswald.

“He’s not my lover. He’s a friend.”

“But why did you call Oswald?” queried Fanny in fury. “Do you love him?”

“I? No! But I want to show you that you can’t play with other persons’ lives as you played with mine. You betrayed me, and now I have had my revenge.”

“I’ll kill you,” howled Fanny again, and she seized Esther by the throat.

“Roberto! Roberto!” cried Esther, terrified.

Roberto burst into the studio, grabbed his cousin by the arm and pulled her violently away from Esther.

“Ah! It’s you, Bob?” exclaimed Fanny, immediately growing calm. “You came in the nick of time. I was going to murder her.”

Roberto’s arrival had the effect of somewhat tranquillizing the company. The four sat down and discussed the matter. They analyzed it as if it were some problem in chess. Fanny loved Oswald. Oswald was in love with Esther, and Esther did not feel the slightest inclination toward the painter. How were they to adjust the situation? Nobody would yield; besides, as they deliberated they went astray in labyrinths of psychological analysis that led nowhere. It had grown dark; Esther lighted the oil lamp and set it down upon the table. The discussion continued coldly; Oswald spoke in a monotone.

“You be the judge,” suggested Fanny to Roberto.

“It seems to me that if everyone will go off on his separate way, each individual conflict will be resolved. But apart from the moral damage you have wrought, Fanny, you have done Esther a very great material injury.”

“I’m ready to indemnify her.”

“I don’t want anything from you,” blurted Esther.

“No. Pardon me,” went on Roberto. “Pardon me for interfering in this matter. You, Fanny, possess a vast fortune, a lofty position in society; Esther, on the other hand, finds herself, and all through your fault, with her future cut off. She has to earn her living, and you don’t know what that means. But I, who do know, know how bitter and sad it is. Esther might have lived a quiet, easy life. Through your fault she has been reduced to her present position.”

“I have already said that I’m willing to indemnify her.”

“And I’ve already said that I don’t want anything from you.”

“No. You ought to let me settle this affair, Esther. May I see you tomorrow, Fanny?”

“I’ll wait for you during the whole afternoon.”

“Very well. We’ll go over this matter.”

Fanny rose to leave; she nodded slightly to Esther and held out her hand to her cousin.

“No hard feelings?” asked Roberto.

“No hard feelings,” she asserted, giving Roberto’s hand a violent shake.

Oswald left in company of Fanny, sinister and humiliated. Esther and Roberto remained alone in the studio.

“Do you know what?” said Roberto, laughing.

“What?”

“You wouldn’t have gained very much by marrying Oswald instead of Bernardo.... Good-bye, till tomorrow.”

“You’re forsaking me, Roberto,” murmured Esther moodily.

“No. I’ll come to see you tomorrow.”

“I don’t want to remain in this house. Take me away from here, Roberto.”

“Doesn’t that seem dangerous to you?”

“Dangerous? For whom? You or me?”

“For both, perhaps.”

“Oh, not for me. I want so much to leave this place, and never see Bernardo,—never have him bother me.”

“He’ll never bother you again.”

“Take me away from here. Take me anywhere.”

“See here, Esther. I’m a man who travels through life over a straight path. That’s my sole strength. I wear blinders, just like horses, and I don’t go off the road. My two ambitions are to make a fortune and marry a good woman. All the rest is, to me, merely a delay in the accomplishment of my aims.”

“And I belong to ... all the rest?”

“Yes. For otherwise you’d make me lose my way.”

“You’re inflexible.”

“Yes. But I’m inflexible with myself as well. You’re in a difficult position. You married a man a year ago,—a man you didn’t love, true enough, but in the belief that he was a loyal, industrious person whom in time you would learn to love. That man has turned out to be a stultified, depraved wretch, utterly lacking in moral fibre. You’re deeply wounded in your woman’s pride,—the pride of a good, energetic woman. I understand that perfectly. You are looking for a spar to rescue you from the wreckage.”

“And you come and say to me, coldly: ‘I can’t be your rescuer; I have other ambitions. If I come across persons on the way who are suffering agonies because no one understands them, I turn my head the other direction and continue on my way.’”

“That’s true. I continue on my way. Would it be better to go ahead and do what any one else would, what a gallant man would, in my place? Take advantage of your plight, get you to become my mistress and then desert you? I have a conscience. Perhaps like my ambitions it is single-tracked. But that’s how it’s made; there’s no help for it.”

“There’s no salvation; my life is ruined,” muttered Esther, her eyes moist.

“Not at all. There’s work. Not all men are base and beastly; struggle on, yes, that’s what life is! Rather unrest, continual toil and moil, rather the unending alternation of pleasures and griefs than stagnation.”

Esther wiped off a tear with her handkerchief.

“Good-bye. I’ll try to follow your advice,” and she held out her hand.

Roberto took it, and in his cavalier-like fashion bowed and kissed it.

He was on the point of leaving when in the voice of an entreating child she whispered, in anguish:

“Oh! Don’t go!”

Roberto returned.

“I’ll not lead you astray,” cried Esther. “Take me away from here. No. I’ll not complain. I’ll be a sister to you,—a servant, if you wish. Do with me whatever you will, but don’t abandon me. Some one would come along and take advantage of my weakness and it would be so much the worse for me.”

“Let us be off, then,” murmured Roberto, touched. “Aren’t you going to let Bernardo know?”

Esther seized a sheet of letter-paper and wrote, in a large hand: “Don’t wait for me. I’m not coming back.” Then nervously she put on her hat and joined Roberto, who was waiting at the door.

“But if you don’t really want to accompany me, Roberto, please don’t do it. Not through any sense of obligation, no,” said Esther, her eyes brimming with tears.

“You’ve said you’ll be my sister. Let’s be going,” he replied, with affection in his voice. Then she fell upon his bosom. Brushing aside the curls from her forehead, he kissed her tenderly.

“No, not like that, not like that,” exclaimed Esther, all atremble, and, seizing Roberto by the wrists she offered her lips to his.

Roberto lost his head. He kissed her frantically. Esther encircled his neck with her arms; a deep sigh of desperation and desire sent tremors rippling from her head to her feet.

“Shall we go?”

“Let’s go.”

They left the house.

A few hours later, Bernardo SantÍn, with his wife’s note in his fingers, was muttering:

“And my poor father? What’s going to become of my poor father now?”

CHAPTER V

General Strike—Gay Times—The Dance at the FrontÓn—Initiation Into Love

JesÚs’s sister welcomed most enthusiastically the two orphans befriended by the compositor on the day before Christmas; La Salvadora and the tiny tot became at once part of the family.

La Salvadora was of a shy, yet despotic disposition; she was so fond of cleaning, sweeping, dusting and shaking that she provoked JesÚs and Manuel. She loved to arrange and put things in order; she was as energetic as she was thin. She brought their meals to JesÚs and to Manuel, because they spent too much at the tavern; at noon she would be off for the printing-shop with a basket of food that was bulkier than herself. With the savings of three months La Fea and La Salvadora purchased a new sewing-machine at an instalment house.

“That girl isn’t going to let us live in peace,” said JesÚs.

The typesetter’s life had returned to normal. He no longer got drunk. Yet despite the care lavished upon him by his sister and La Salvadora, he became daily more sombre and glum.

One winter’s evening when he had received his pay and was leaving the shop, JesÚs asked Manuel:

“See here. Aren’t you tired of working?”

“Pse!”

“Aren’t you bored stiff by this routine, monotonous existence?”

“Well, what are you going to do about it?”

“Anything rather than keep this up!”

“If you were only alone, as I am!”

“La Fea and La Salvadora are on the way to taking care of themselves,” said JesÚs. In the spring, he added, he and Manuel ought to undertake a hike over the road, working a bit here and there and always seeing new faces and new places. He knew that the Department of the Interior helped out such travellers with a sum that consisted of two reales for every town through which they passed. If they could get such aid they ought to be off at once.

They were crossing the Plaza del Progreso, engrossed in this discussion, when a band of strolling students passed by playing a lilting march. It was beginning to snow; it was very cold.

“Shall we have a good supper tonight? What do you say?” asked JesÚs.

“They’ll be waiting for us at home.”

“Let ’em wait! A day is a day. Are we going to stick there all our lives long, skimping, to save up a few nasty coins? Save! For what?”

They retraced their steps, hurrying along through the Calle de Barrionuevo, and on the Calle de la Paz they entered a tavern and ordered supper. As they ate they discussed their projected journey with enthusiasm. They drank several toasts to it. Manuel had never been so merry. They were fully agreed, ready to explore the North Pole.

“Now we ought to go to the dance at the FrontÓn,” mumbled JesÚs at dessert in a stuttering voice. “We’ll pick up a couple of skirts and whoop ’er up for a gay old time! As for the printing-shop,—devil take it.”

“That’s what,” repeated Manuel. “To the dance! And let the lame boss go to hell. Get a move on, you!”

They got up, paid their bill, and as they walked through the Calle de Caretas they entered another tavern for a couple of glasses more.

Stumbling against everybody they reached the Calle de TetuÁn, where JesÚs insisted that they have two more glasses. They entered another tavern and sat down. The compositor was consumed by a raging thirst: he slouched there, a pallid wreck. Manuel, on the other hand, felt that his blood was on fire and his cheeks darted flames.

“Come on, let’s be moving,” he said to JesÚs. But the typesetter could not stir. Manuel hesitated whether to remain there or leave JesÚs sleeping with his head fallen upon the table.

Manuel staggered to the street. The snowflakes, dancing before his eyes, made him dizzy. He reached the Puerta del Sol. At the corner of the Carrera de San JerÓnimo he caught sight of a girl who was accosting men. At first he confused her with La Rabanitos, but it was not she.

This girl had a face swollen with erysipelas.

“Hey, what are you doing?” asked Manuel of her, bruskly.

“Can’t you see? I’m selling Heraldos.”

“And nothing else?”

She lowered her voice, which was hoarse and broken, and added:

“And ready for a good time.”

Manuel’s heart began to throb violently.

“Haven’t you a sweetheart?” he inquired.

“I don’t want any steadies.”

“Why not?”

“They take away all the money a girl earns and then finish up the job with a good beating. Yes, they do....”

“How much’ll you take for coming along with me?”

“Ha! There’s a joke for you! Why, you haven’t a cÉntimo!”

“Who said so?”

“I’ll bet you haven’t.”

“I have, too,” muttered Manuel boastfully. “Five duros to blow and you’re no use to me at all.”

“Neither are you to me.”

“Listen here,” blurted Manuel. Seizing the girl by the arm he gave her a rude shove.

“Hey, you. Quit that, asaÚra!” she cried.

“I don’t feel like it.”

“You’re nobody, you ain’t. And keep your hands where they belong, d’ye hear?”

“If you’re willing, I’ll treat you to coffee,” and Manuel jingled the money in his pocket.

The girl hesitated, then gave the newspapers that she held in her hand to an old woman. She tied her kerchief about her neck and went off with Manuel to a bun shop on the Calle de Jacometrezo. A cinnamon-hued puppy ran after them.

“Is that your dog?”

“Yes.”

“What’s his name?”

“Sevino.”

“And why do you call him that?”

“Because he walked right into our house without anybody bringing him.”[3]

They entered the bun shop. It was a spacious place, adorned with columns, at the rear of which was the kitchen, with its huge caldron for making buns. Two gas-lights, the burners of which were surrounded by white globes, shed a sad illumination upon the walls and the square columns, which were covered by white tiles bearing blue designs. Manuel and the girl sat down at a table near a door that led to a back street.

The girl prattled away at a merry clip as she dipped pieces of a bitter coffee-cake into the cup of chocolate. Her name was Petra, but they called her Matilde because that sounded so much better. She was sixteen years old and lived on the Calle del Amparo in an attic. She got up at two; but by the time she arose her mother had already done the house chores. She did not go out till evening. She sold a handful of Heraldos and ten Correos, and after that ... whatever turned up. All the money she earned she gave to her mother, and when her mother suspected that she was holding any back, she caught it hot and heavy.

Manuel sipped his glass of whiskey gravely, listened to what she said yet understood hardly a word.

The lass was ugly, in all truth. Her face was caked with powder. To Manuel, after a long scrutiny, it occurred that she looked like a fish smothered in flour, waiting for the frying-pan. As she spoke she made all manner of grimaces and moved her white, bulging eyelids, which fell over her darting eyes.

The girl babbled on about her mother, her brother, an uncle of hers who owned a news-stand and every morning advanced a duro to the kids who sold the Blanco y Negro, requiring the children to bring back the duro plus a peseta at the end of the day,—and about a host of other matters.

As she chattered away, Manuel recalled that JesÚs had made some mention of a dance, although he could no longer remember just where it was to be held.

“Let’s go to that ball,” he said.

“Which? Over at the FrontÓn?”

“Yes.”

“Come on.”

They left the bun shop. It was still snowing. Proceeding through several deserted by-ways they reached the handball court. The two arc lights at the entrance threw a powerful illumination upon the white street. Manuel bought two tickets; he checked his cape and she her cloak, and they went in.

The FrontÓn was a large rectangular area, with one of the longer walls painted a dark blue and marked at regular intervals with white lines and numbers. The other long wall supported the tiers and the boxes.

Two large green screens bounded the shorter walls of the court. Above, at the top of the high roof, amidst the iron framework, ten or twelve glowing arc lamps, free of crystal globes, flashed a dazzling light.

This vast space, painted a dark hue, looked like an unoccupied machine shop.

A number of night birds of very low flight, bedecked with Manila mantles and flowers in their hair, displayed their busts in the boxes. It was cold.

When the military band burst into its noisy music the people from the corridors and from the restaurant came dancing out on to the floor, and in a little while the couples were whirling around the hall. There were no more than half a dozen masks. The dance grew more animated. By the cold, crude light from the arc lamps one could see the couples turning around, all the dancers very solemn, very stiff, as lugubrious as if they were attending a burial.

Some of the men rested their lips against the women’s foreheads. But one felt no atmosphere of passionate desire or fever. It was the dance of a people in whom life had been extinguished, of puppets with eyes that bespoke weariness or repressed anger. At times some wag, as if feeling the necessity of proving that this was a carnival ball, would stretch himself out on the floor or let out a piercing yell. There would be a momentary confusion, but soon order was restored and the dancing was resumed.

Manuel was filled with an impulse to do something wild. He got up and began to dance with his girl. She, however, vexed because he could not keep in time, went back to her seat. Disconsolate, Manuel did the same. Couples tripped by before them; the women with daubed faces and darkened eyes, with a beastly expression upon their rouged lips, and the men with an arrogant mien and an aggressive glance.

Angrily the men ripped through the streamers that were thrown down from the boxes, entangling the dancers.

A drunken negro, seated near Manuel, greeted the passing of some good-looking woman with a shout that mimicked a child’s voice:

“OlÉ there! My gipsy baby!”

“Hello, Manolo,” came a voice to Manuel’s ears. It was Vidal, who was dancing with an elegant mask, tightly clasping her waist.

“Come see me tomorrow,” said Vidal.

“Where?”

“Seven at night, at the CafÉ de Lisboa.”

“Good.”

Vidal was soon lost with his partner in the whirlpool of dancers. The music paused for an intermission.

“Shall we leave?” asked Manuel of the girl.

“Yes, let’s be going.”

Manuel was all atremble with emotion at thought that the tragic moment was approaching. They went to the check-room, got their clothes and left.

It was still snowing. The light from the electric globes over the door of the FrontÓn illuminated the street, which was covered with a white sheet of snow. Manuel and the girl crossed the Puerta del Sol in haste, went up the Calle de Correos, turned into the Calle de la Paz and stopped before an open gate which was lighted by the half confidential, half mysterious glow that came from a large, very lugubrious lantern.

They pushed aside a glass door and disappeared up the dark staircase.

CHAPTER VI

The Snow—More Tales From Don Alonso—Las Injurias—The Asilo del Sur

Manuel slept like a log the whole of the following morning. Indeed, when he got up it was past three in the afternoon.

He knocked at JesÚs’s door. La Fea was at the machine and La Salvadora was sitting in a tiny chair ripping some skirts; the tot was playing on the floor.

“Where’s JesÚs?” asked Manuel.

“I guess you know better than we do,” retorted La Salvadora, her voice quivering with anger.

“I ... left him ...; then I met a friend....” Manuel forced himself to invent a lie. “Perhaps he’s at the shop,” he added.

“No. He’s not at the printing shop,” replied La Salvadora.

“I’ll go look for him.”

Manuel left the hostelry of Santa Casilda in shame. He walked toward the heart of the city and asked for his friend at the tavern on the Calle de TetuÁn.

“He was here,” answered the waiter, “until the place closed. Then he went off as drunk as a lord, I don’t know where.”

Manuel returned to the house, and went back to bed with the intention of going to the printing shop on the next day. But the following day he awoke late again. He was overcome by an inertia that seemed impossible to conquer.

He came upon La Salvadora in the corridor.

“Haven’t you gone to the shop today, either?” she asked.

“No.”

“Very well, then. Don’t trouble yourself ever to come back here again,” rasped the girl, furiously. “We don’t need any tramps. While we’re here slaving away, you fellows go out for a gay time. I’m telling you, now, don’t ever show up here again, and if you see JesÚs, tell him the same for his sister and for me.”

Manuel shrugged his shoulders and left the house. It had been snowing all day. In the Puerta del Sol gangs of street-sweepers and hose men were clearing away the drifts; the filthy water ran along the gutters.

Several times Manuel stepped into the CafÉ de Lisboa, hoping to come upon Vidal. Not finding him there he had a bite at a tavern, after which he went for a stroll through the streets. It got dark very early. Madrid, enveloped in snow, was deserted. The Plaza de Oriente looked unreal, somewhat like a scene set upon a stage. The monarchs of stone wore white cloaks. The statue in the centre of the square stood out nobly against the sky of grey. From the Viaduct there was a view of white expanses. Toward Madrid lay a heap of yellowish structures and black roofs, of towers jutting into the milky heavens, reddened by a luminous irradiation.

Manuel returned to the house in low spirits; he threw himself into bed.

“Tomorrow I’m going back to the shop,” he said to himself. But on the morrow he did not go back. He rose very early with that intention, and was actually about to enter the printery when the idea occurred to him that the boss might raise a rumpus, so he turned away. “If not here, then I’ll find work elsewhere,” he thought, and he turned his steps back in the direction of the Puerta del Sol, proceeding thence to the Plaza de Oriente, through the Calle de BailÉn, and the Calle de Ferraz to the Paseo de Rosales. The avenue was silent and deserted.

From this point could be viewed the entire landscape white under the snow, the dark groves of the Casa de Campo, and the round hills bristling with black pine trees. The pallid sun hovered in a leaden sky. Near the horizon, in the direction of Villaverde, shone a strip of clear blue sky in a pink mist. Profound silence everywhere. Only the strident whistle of the locomotives and the hammering in the workshops of the EstaciÓn del Norte disturbed that calm. Not a footfall resounded on the pavement.

The houses along the avenue displayed snowy adornments upon balustrade and coping; the trees seemed to flatten under that white mantle.

That afternoon Manuel returned toward the printing-shop, ventured inside and asked the pressman for JesÚs.

“He got a fierce call-down from the boss,” was the answer.

“Did he fire him?”

“Maybe not! Go up now and take your medicine.”

Manuel, about to go up, paused.

“Has JesÚs gone already?”

“Yes. He must be in the corner tavern.”

And he really was. He sat before a table drinking a glass of whisky. There was a sad, doleful expression upon his face. He was a prey to his sombre thoughts.

“What are you doing?” asked Manuel.

“Oh, it’s you, is it?”

“Yes. Did the old cripple discharge you?”

“Yes.”

“Were you thinking of anything?”

“Pse!... There’s nothing doing, anyway. Come on, let’s have a glass or two.”

“No, not for me.”

“You’ll do as you’re told. I’ve got only forty cÉntimos, which is as good as nothing. Hey, waiter! A couple of glasses.”

They drank and then walked off in the direction of the Santa Casilda hostelry. It was still snowing. JesÚs, his cheeks hectic, coughed desperately.

“I warn you: Salvadora, that little kid, will raise holy hell,” said Manuel. “Such a temper she has!”

“Well, what do they want? To have us saving up money all our lives? I’m glad that the kid is in the house, for she can take care of La Fea, who is the unhappier of the two.... And you,—how much have you got left from your pay?” asked the compositor of Manuel.

“Me? Not even a button.”

At this reply JesÚs was so deeply moved that he seized his companion by the arm and assured him in the most ardent outbursts that he esteemed him and loved him as a brother.

“And may I be damned!” he concluded, “if I’m not willing to do anything under the sun for you. For this telling me that you haven’t even a button is worth more to me than all the deeds of the hero of Cascorro.”[4]

Manuel, affected by these words, asseverated in a husky voice that though he was a vagabond and a good-for-nothing, he was ready to perform any sacrifice for so staunch a friend.

In order to celebrate such tender protestations of amity, they both lurched into a tavern on the Calle de Barrionuevo and gulped down a few more glasses of whisky.

They reached the Santa Casilda hostelry dead drunk. The house janitor came out to meet them, demanding of each the rent for his room. JesÚs answered jestingly that they gave him no money because they had none to give. He rejoined that either they paid or they could take to the street, whereupon the compositor dared him to throw them out.

The man’s wife, who might have been a soldier, took them both by the shoulder and shoved them into the street.

“Lord, oh Lord! The weaker sex!” mumbled JesÚs. “That’s what they call the weaker sex!... And they can throw a fellow out of the house.... And where’s a guy going to get two duros?... Well, what do you say to that, Manuel? Hey? The weaker sex.... How do you like such a figurative manner of speech?... It’s we who are the weaker, and they simply abuse their strength.”

They began to stagger along the street; neither felt the cold.

From time to time JesÚs would pause and deliver a diatribe; a man would laugh as they passed by, or a youngster, from some doorway, would call after them and send a snowball in their direction.

“I wonder whom they’re laughing at?” thought Manuel.

The Ronda was silent, white, cut by a dark stream of water left by the carts. The large flakes came falling down, interweaving in their descent; they danced in the gusts of wind like white butterflies. During the intervals of calm they would glide slowly, softly through the greyish atmosphere, like the gentle down from the neck of a swan.

Afar, in the mist, lay the white landscape of the suburbs, the gently curving slopes, the houses and the cemeteries of the Campo de San Isidro. Against this background everything stood out more distinct than ordinarily: the roofs, the mudwalls, the trees, the lanterns thickly hooded in snow.

In this whitish ambient the black smoke belched forth by the chimneys spread through the air like a threat.

“The weaker sex. Hey, Manuel?” continued JesÚs, harping upon his fixed idea. “And yet they can show a fellow to the door.... It’s as if they said the weak snow.... Because you tread upon it.... Isn’t that so?... But the snow makes you cold.... And then who’s the weaker, you or the snow?... You, because you catch cold. That’s all a fellow does in this world,—catch cold.... Everything is cold, understand?... Everything.... Like the snow.... Do you see how white it is, eh? It looks so good, so affectionate ... the weaker sex.... Well, touch it, and you freeze.”

They squandered their last cÉntimos on another glass of whisky, and from that moment they were no longer conscious of their doings.

The following morning they awoke frozen through and through, in a shed of the Cattle Market situated near the Paseo de los Pontones.

JesÚs was coughing horribly.

“You stay here,” said Manuel to him. “I’m going to see whether I can pick up something to eat.”

He went out to the Ronda. The snow had ceased. Several gamins were amusing themselves by throwing snowballs at one another. He went up the Calle del Águila; the cobbler’s was closed. It then occurred to Manuel to hunt out Jacob; he turned toward the Viaduct and was walking along absent-mindedly when he felt some one grab him by the shoulders and cry:

“Stay thy hand, Abraham. Where are you bound?”

It was the Snake-Man, the illustrious Don Alonso.

Manuel told him what straits he and JesÚs were in.

“Don’t give up; better times are coming,” mumbled the Snake-Man. “Have you any place to go to?”

“A shed.”

“Good. Let’s go there. I’ve got a peseta. That’s enough to get the three of us a bite.”

They went into a chop house on the Calle del Águila where, for two reales, they received a pot of stew; they bought bread and then the pair made quickly for the shed. They ate, laid aside something for the night, and after their meal Don Alonso tore loose several pickets from a fence and succeeded in starting a fire inside the shed.

That afternoon it began to rain in torrents; the Snake-Man considered it his duty to enliven the company, so he told one tale after the other, always commencing with his eternal refrain of “Once in America....”

“Once in America”—(and this is the least unlikely tale of all he told)—“we were sailing down the Mississippi on a steamer. And let me tell you, those steamboats rock so little that you can play billiards on them. Well, we were sailing along and we reach a certain town. The boat stops and we see a mob of people on the wharf of that village. We draw nearer and we behold that they’re all Indians, with the exception of a few guards and Yankee soldiers.

“I” (and Don Alonso added this information proudly) “who was the director, said to my musicians, ‘We must start a lively tune,’ and right away, Boom! Boom! Tra, la, la!... You can’t imagine the shouts and the shrieks and the croaking of that crowd.

“When the band had stopped playing, a big fat Indian squaw with her head full of cock feathers steps up to me and begins to make ceremonial greetings. I asked one of the Yankees, ‘Who is this lady?’ ‘She’s the queen,’ he said, ‘and she wants a little more music.’ I saluted the queen. Most excellent lady! (And I made an elegant series of Versaillesque bows, setting one foot back.) I said to the members of the band, ‘Boys, a little more music for her Majesty.’ They started up again, and the queen, highly pleased, saluted me with her hand on her heart. I did the same. Most excellent lady!

“We put up our portable circus in a few hours and I withdrew to ponder over the programme. I was the director. ‘We’ll have to give The Mounted Indian,’ I said to myself. Even though it’s a discredited number in the cities, they can’t know it here. Then I’ll exhibit my ecuyÈres, acrobats, equilibrists, pantomimists and, as a finale, the clowns, who will be the climax of the show. The fellow who was to play The Mounted Indian I tipped off and said, ‘See here, make yourself up to look as much like our audience as possible.’ ‘Don’t worry about that, director,’ he answered. Boys! It was a sensational success. When the ‘Indian’ appeared, what a racket of applause!”

Don Alonso mimed the number; he crouched, imitating the movements of one about to mount a horse; he sank his head in his chest, staring at a fixed point and imitated the whirling of a lasso above his head.

“The Mounted Indian,” continued Don Alonso, “won the applause of the other Indians. I’m positive that not one of them knew how to ride a horse. Then there was an acrobatic number, followed by a variety of others, until the time for the clowns came around. ‘Here’s where there’s pandemonium,’ I thought to myself. And surely enough, all they had to do was appear when a wild tumult broke loose. ‘They’re having a wonderful time,’ I said to myself, when in comes a boy. ‘Director, SeÑor Director!’ ‘What’s the trouble?’ ‘The whole audience is leaving.’ ‘Leaving?’ And indeed, they were. The Indians had become scared at sight of the clowns, and imagined that they were evil spirits come there to spoil the performance for them. I jump into the ring, and send the clowns stumbling off. Then, to efface the bad impression, I performed several sleight-of-hand tricks. When I began to belch ribbons of flame from my mouth, Lord, what a triumph! The whole house was astounded. But when I palmed a couple of rings and then drew out of my coat pocket a fish-bowl filled with live fishes, I received the greatest ovation of my career.”

Don Alonso was silent. JesÚs and Manuel prepared to go to sleep, stretched out on the ground, huddled into a corner. The rain came down in bucketfuls; the water drummed loudly upon the roof of the shed; the wind whistled and moaned from afar.

It began to thunder, and it was for all the world as if some train were crashing headlong down a metal slope, so continuous, so violent was the thundering.

“A fine tempest!” grunted JesÚs.

“Bah! Tempests on land!” sniffed Don Alonso. “Cheap stuff! Tempests on land are mere imitations. At sea,—that’s where you want to witness a tempest, at sea! when the waves come sweeping over the masts.... Even on the lakes. On Lake Erie and Lake Michigan I’ve been through tremendous storms, with waves as high as houses. But I must admit that the wind goes down almost at once and in a little while the water is as smooth as the pond of the Retiro. Why, once yonder in America....”

But Manuel and JesÚs, weary of American tales, pretended to be fast asleep and the former Snake-Man sank into disconsolate silence, thinking of the days when he palmed the Indians’ rings and drew forth fish-bowls.

They could not sleep; several times they had to get up and change their places, for the water leaked through the roof.

On the following morning, when they left their hole, it was no longer raining. The snow had been melted completely. The Cattle Market was transformed into a swamp; the pavement of the Ronda, into a sea of mud; the houses and the trees dripped water; everything was black, miry, abandoned; only a few wandering, famished, mud-stained dogs were sniffing about in the heaps of refuse.

Manuel pawned his cape and on the advice of JesÚs protected his chest with several layers of newspaper. For his cape he was allowed ten reales at a pawnbroker’s, and the three went off to eat at the Shelter of the MontaÑa del PrÍncipe PÍo.

Manuel and JesÚs, accompanied by Don Alonso, went into two printing shops and inquired after work, but there was none. At night they went back to the shelter for supper. Don Alonso suggested that they go to the beggars’ DepÓsito. Thither the three wended their way; it was dusk; before the doors of the DepÓsito there was a long row of tattered ragamuffins, waiting for them to open; JesÚs and Manuel were opposed to going in.

They walked through the little wood near the MontaÑa barracks; some soldiers and prostitutes were chatting and smoking in a group. They went along the Calle de Ferraz, then along BailÉn; they crossed the Viaduct, and going through the Calle de Toledo, reached the Paseo de los Pontones.

The corner of the shed where they had spent the previous night was now occupied by a crew of young vagabonds.

They resumed their trudging through the mud; it began to rain anew. Manuel proposed that they go to La Blasa’s tavern, and by the staircase of the Paseo Imperial they descended to the quarters of Las Injurias. The tavern was closed. They walked down a lane. Their feet sank into mud and pools of water. They noticed a hovel with an open door; they went inside. The Snake-Man struck a match. The place had two rooms, each a couple of metres square. The walls of the dingy dens oozed dampness and slime; the floor, of tamped earth, was riddled with the constant dripping and covered with puddles. The kitchen was a cess-pool of pestilence; in the centre rose a mound of refuse and excrement; in the corners, dead, desiccated cockroaches.

The next morning they left the house. It was a damp, dreary day; afar, the fields lay wrapped in mist. Las Injurias district was depopulated; its denizens were on their way through the muddy lanes to Madrid, on the hunt. Some ascended to the Paseo Imperial, others trooped down though the Arroyo de Embajadores.

They were a repulsive rout; some, ragpickers; others, mendicants; still others, starvelings; almost all of them of nauseating mien. Worse in appearance than the men were the women,—filthy, dishevelled, tattered. This was human refuse, enfolded in rags, swollen with cold and dankness, vomited up by this pest-ridden quarter. Here was a medley of skin-diseases, marks left by all the ailments to which the flesh is heir, the jaundiced hue of tertian fever, the contracted eyelash,—all the various stigmata of illness and poverty.

“If the rich could only see this, eh?” asked Don Alonso.

“Bah! They’d do nothing,” muttered JesÚs.

“Why not?”

“Because they wouldn’t. If you were to deprive the rich man of the satisfaction of knowing that while he sleeps another is freezing, and that while he eats another is dying of hunger, you would deprive him of half his pleasure and good fortune.”

“Do you really believe that?” asked Don Alonso, staring in astonishment at JesÚs.

“I certainly do. What’s more,—why should we bother with what they may think? They don’t give themselves any concern over us. At this hour they must be sleeping in their clean, soft beds, so peacefully, while we....”

The Snake-Man made a gesture of displeasure; he was vexed that any one should speak ill of the rich.

The sun came out: a disk of red over the black earth. Then carts began to arrive at the Gas Work’s dumping grounds and to dump rubbish and refuse. Here and there in the doorways of the hovels that filled the hollow appeared a woman with a cigar in her mouth.

One night the watchman of Las Injurias discovered the three men in the abandoned shanty and ejected them.

The following days, Manuel and JesÚs—the showman had disappeared—decided to go to the Asilo de las Delicias for the night. Neither was at all bent upon finding work. It was already almost a month since they had taken to this tramp’s existence, and between one day at a barracks and the next in a monastery or a shelter, they managed to keep going.

The first time that JesÚs and Manuel slept in the Asilo de las Delicias was a March day.

When they reached the Asilo it had not yet opened. They passed their wait strolling along the old Yeseros road. They wandered into the fields nearby, where they saw wretched shacks in the doorways of which some men were playing at chito or tejo, while bands of ragged children swarmed about.

These by-roads were gloomy, bleak, desolate spots,—the abode of ruins, as if a city had been reared there and been annihilated by a cataclysm. On all sides were heaps of refuse and dÉbris, gullies filled with rubbish; here and there a broken stone chimney, a shattered lime-kiln. Only at rare intervals might one catch a glimpse of a garden with its draw-well; in the distance, on the hills that bounded the horizon, rose the dim suburbs and scattered houses. It was a disquieting vicinity; behind the hillock one came suddenly upon evil-looking vagabonds in groups of three or four.

Through a little gorge nearby flowed the AbroÑigal, a rivulet; Manuel and JesÚs followed it until they reached a stone bridge called Tres Ojos.

They returned at night. The shelter was already open. It was on the right hand side of the Yeseros road, in the vicinity of a number of abandoned cemeteries. Its pointed roof, its galleries and wooden staircases, lent it the appearance of a Swiss chÂlet. On the balcony was a signboard attached to the balustrade, reading: “Asilo Municipal del Sur.” A lantern with a red glass shed its gory light upon the deserted fields.

Manuel and JesÚs went down several steps; at a counter a clerk who was scribbling away in a big book asked them their names; they replied and then entered the institution. The section for men consisted of two large rooms lit by gas-burners, separated by a partition wall; each had wooden pillars and high, tiny windows. JesÚs and Manuel crossed the first room and went into the second, where there were several men stretched out here and there upon the beds. They, too, lay down and chatted for a while....

As they spoke, a number of beggars kept coming in, taking possession of the beds that were placed in the middle of the room and near the pillars. These new arrivals dropped on to the floor their coats, their patched capes, their filthy undershirts,—a heap of tatters,—at the same time depositing tin cans filled with cigarette ends, pots and baskets.

Almost all the patrons of the place went into the second room.

“There isn’t such a draught in this room,” said an old beggar who was preparing to lie down near Manuel.

Several ragamuffins between fifteen and twenty years of age burst into the place, took possession of a corner and settled down to a game of canÉ.

“You bunch of rascals!” cried the old beggar near Manuel. “You had to choose this place to come and gamble in. Damn it!”

“Wow! Listen to what old Wrinkle-face is bawling about now!” retorted one of the gamins.

“Shut your mouth, Old Bore! You’re as bad as Don Nicanor pounding his drum,” jeered another.

“Tramps! Vagabonds!” growled the old fellow angrily.

Manuel turned toward the fuming old man. He was a diminutive creature, with a sparse, greyish beard; he had a pair of eyes that looked like scars and black spectacles that reached to the middle of his forehead. He wore a patched, grimy coat; a flat, woolen cap, on top of which sat a derby with a greasy brim. As he had entered, he had disburdened himself of a canvas bag which he dropped to the floor.

“It’s these whippersnappers that get us in wrong,” explained the old man. “Last year they robbed the shelter telephone and stole a piece of lead from a water-pipe.”

Manuel swept the room with his glance. Near him, a tall old fellow with a white beard and the features of an apostle, leaned his shoulder against one of the pillars, immersed in his thoughts; he wore a smock, a muffler and a cap. In the corner occupied by the impudent, blustering ragamuffins rose the silhouette of a man garbed in black,—the type of a retired official. On his knees reposed the head of a slumbering boy of five or six.

All the rest were of bestial appearance; beggars that looked like highwaymen; maimed and crippled who roamed the streets exhibiting their deformities; unemployed labourers, now inured to idleness, amongst whom was an occasional specimen of a ruined gentleman, with straggling beard and greasy locks, whose bearing and apparel,—collar, cravat and cuffs, filthy as they might be,—still recalled a certain distinction,—a pallid reflection of the splendour that once had been.

The air in the room very soon grew hot, and the atmosphere, saturated with the odour of tobacco and poverty, became nauseating.

Manuel lay back in his cot and listened to the conversation that had sprung up between JesÚs and the old man with the black spectacles. The fellow was an inveterate beggar, a connoisseur in all the arts of exploiting official charity.

Despite his continuous wanderings hither and thither, he had never been more than five or six leagues away from Madrid.

“Once upon a time this shelter was a good place,” he explained to JesÚs. “There was a stove; each cot had its woollen blanket, and in the morning everybody got a good plate of soup.”

“Yes, water soup,” sneered another beggar, a young, thin, long-haired lad whose cheeks were browned by the sun.

“Even so. It warmed a fellow’s innards.”

The man of refinement, doubtless disgusted to find himself amid this rout of ragamuffins, took the sleeping child in his arms and drew near to the place occupied by Manuel and JesÚs. He joined the conversation and began to relate his tribulations. Sad as his story was, there was yet something comical about it.

He came from a provincial capital, having left a modest position and believed in the words of the district deputy, who promised him a situation in the offices of the Ministry. For two months he tagged at the heels of the deputy; at the end of this time he found himself face to face with the direst poverty, absolutely without influence or recourse. In the meantime he was writing to his wife, inspiring her with hope.

The previous day he had been thrown out of his boarding-house and after having tramped over half of Madrid without finding a way to earn a peseta, had gone to the authorities and asked for an officer to conduct him and his child to some shelter. “I take only beggars to the shelter,” was the guard’s reply. “I’m going out begging,” answered the man humbly, “so you can take me.” “No,” was the officer’s answer. “First you must actually beg, then I’ll arrest you.”

The officer was intractable. At this moment a man happened to be going by. The father approached him with his child, brought his hand to his hat, but the request could not issue from his lips. It was then that the guard advised him to go to the Asilo de las Delicias.

“If they’d arrested you, you’d have gained nothing by it,” said the fellow with the black spectacles. “They’d have taken you off to the Cerro del Pimiento, and you’d have spent the livelong day there without so much as a crumb.”

“And then what would they have done with me?” asked the gentleman of refinement.

“Expel you from Madrid.”

“But aren’t there places here where a person can spend the night?” asked JesÚs.

“A raft of them,” replied the old man. “Everywhere you go. Especially now, when it’s so cold in the winter.”

“I’ve lived,” chimed in the young beggar, “for more than half a year in Vaciamadrid,—an almost depopulated town. A comrade of mine and myself found a house that was closed, and we installed ourselves in it. For a few weeks we lived swimmingly. At night we’d go to the Arganda station; we’d bore a hole with an auger in a cask of wine, fill up our wine-bag and then stuff the hole with pitch.”

“And why did you leave the place?” queried Manuel.

“The civil guard laid siege to us and we were forced to escape through the windows. I’ll be damned if I wasn’t already tired of the joint. I like to roam along the road, one day here, another there. That’s the way a fellow meets people who know a thing or two, and picks up an education....”

“Have you done much tramping hereabouts?”

“All my life. I can’t use up more than one pair of sandals per town. If I stay very long in the same place I grow so uneasy that I just have to get a move on. Ah! The country! There’s nothing like it. You eat where you can. In winter it’s tough. But summer time! You make your thyme bed underneath a tree and have a magnificent sleep, better than the king himself. When the cold comes around, then, like the swallows, off you fly to wherever it’s nice and warm.”

The old man with the black spectacles, scornful of what the young vagabond had said, informed JesÚs as to the nooks to be found in the outlying districts.

“Now let me tell you where I go when it’s fine weather. There’s a cemetery near the third DepÓsito. There are some houses there that we’ll go to this spring.”

The conclusion of the conversation reached Manuel in but a confused form, as he had fallen asleep. At midnight he was awakened by some voices. In the corner to which the ragamuffins had repaired two boys were rolling over the floor in a hand to hand struggle.

“I’ll pay you,” muttered one between his teeth.

“Let go. You’re choking me.”

The old mendicant, who had been awakened, got up in a fury and, seizing his stick, let it fall hard upon the shoulder of one of the boys. The youth who was struck down rose up, roaring with anger.

“Come on, now, you pig! You son of a dirty bitch!” he shrieked.

They rushed for each other, exchanged several blows and then both fell headlong to the floor.

“These young tramps are getting us in wrong,” exclaimed the old man.

A guard re-established order and expelled the trouble-makers. The denizens of the shelter were again calm and nothing more was heard save the muffled or sibilant snoring of the sleepers....

The next morning, even before daybreak, when the doors of the Asilo were opened, every one who had spent the night there left the place and had in a moment disappeared into the outskirts.

Manuel and JesÚs chose the Calle de Mendez Alvaro. On the platforms of the EstaciÓn del MediodÍa the electric arcs shone like globes of light in the gloomy atmosphere of the night.

From the chimneys of the roundhouse rose dense pillars of white smoke; the red and green pupils of the signal lamps winked confidentially from their lofty poles; the straining boilers of the locomotives sent forth most horrible roars.

On both sides along the perspective of the thoroughfare quivered the pale lights of the distant street lamps. Yonder in the country, through the air that was as murky and yellowish as ground glass, could be made out upon the colourless fields, low cottages, black picket fences, high gnarled telegraph poles, distant, obscure embankments that formed the railroad bed. A few ramshackle taverns, lighted by a languidly burning oil lamp, were open.... With the opaque glow of dawn appeared, to the right, the wide, leaden roof of the EstaciÓn del MediodÍa, glistening with dew; opposite, the pile of the General Hospital, jaundice-hued; to the left, the barren fields, the indistinct brown vegetable patches that rose until they blended, with the undulating hills of the horizon under the grey, humid sky, into the vast desolation of the Madrilenian suburbs....

CHAPTER VII

The Black House—Conflagration—Flight

Near the station stretched a line of carriages; the cabmen had lighted a fire. Here JesÚs and Manuel warmed themselves for a moment.

“We’ll have to go to that town,” muttered JesÚs.

“Which?”

“That uninhabited place the fellow was telling us about. Vaciamadrid.”

“I’m ready.”

A train had just pulled into the station, so Manuel and JesÚs took up a position at the entrance, where the passengers were coming out; they hoped to earn a few coins by carrying some valise.

Manuel was lucky enough to lug a gentleman’s bundle to a carriage, for which service he received a modest fee.

Manuel and JesÚs proceeded now to the Prado. They were passing the Museo when they beheld a hackman whipping up his horses, and, behind the carriage, running with all his might, Don Alonso, dressed in a suit that seemed nothing but rents and tatters.

“Hey, there!” shouted Manuel to him.

Don Alonso turned around, came to a stop and walked back to JesÚs and Manuel.

“Where were you bound in such a hurry?” they asked him.

“I was after that carriage, to carry up the gentleman’s trunk for him. But I’m exhausted. My legs are caving in.”

“And what are you doing?” asked Manuel.

“Pse!... Starving to death.”

“Better times haven’t come yet?”

“Will they ever come? Napoleon met his finish at Waterloo, didn’t he? Well, my life is one continuous Waterloo.”

“What are you doing now?”

“I’ve been selling smutty books. I ought to have one here,” he added, showing Manuel a pamphlet, the title of which read: “The Wiles of Women on The First Night.”

“Is that a good one?” asked Manuel.

“Oh, so so. Let me warn you beforehand that you’re supposed to read only every other line. To think of me, fallen to such things! I, who have been director of a circus in Niu Yoc!”

“Better times are coming.”

“A few nights ago I went out staggering, famished, and made my way to an Emergency Hospital. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ I was asked by an attendant. ‘Hunger.’ ‘That’s not a disease,’ he replied. Then I went begging and now I go every night to the Salamanca quarter, and I tell passing women that a little boy of mine has just died and that I need a few reales with which to purchase candles. They are horrified and usually come across with something. I’ve also found a place to sleep. It’s over yonder by the river.”

The trio ate their next meal at the MarÍa Cristina barracks, and in the afternoon the Snake-Man left for his centre of operations in the Salamanca quarter.

“I’ve made a peseta and a half today,” he said to Manuel and JesÚs. “Let’s go for supper.”

They supped at the Barcelona hostelry, on the Calle del Caballero de Gracia, and spent whatever was left on whisky.

Thereupon they repaired to the spot that had been discovered by Don Alonso,—a tumbledown dwelling near the Toledo bridge. They christened it the Black House. Nothing was left of it save the four walls, which had been levelled to the height of the first story.

It stood in the centre of an orchard; for roof it had a wattle over which projected a number of beams as black and straight as smokestacks.

The three entered the ruin. They crossed the patio, leaping over dÉbris, tiles, rotten wood and mounds of ordure. They made their way through a corridor. Don Alonso struck a match, holding it lighted in the hollow of his palms. Some gipsy families and several beggars dwelt here in secret. Some had made their beds of rags and straw; others were asleep, leaning against matweed ropes that were fastened to the wall.

Don Alonso had his special corner, to which he took Manuel and JesÚs.

The floor was damp, earthen; a few of the house walls were still standing; the holes in the roof were plugged with bunches of cane that had been gathered by the river, and with pieces of matting.

“Deuce take it all!” exclaimed Don Alonso as he stretched himself out. “A fellow has always got to be on the lookout for a place. If I could only be a snail!”

“Why a snail?” queried JesÚs.

“If only to get out of paying bills for lodgings.”

“Better times are coming,” promised Manuel, ironically.

“That’s the only hope,” replied the Snake-Man. “By tomorrow our luck may have shifted. You don’t know life. Fate is to man what the wind is to the weathervane.”

“The trouble is,” grumbled JesÚs, “that our weathervane, when it isn’t pointing to hunger, is pointing to cold and always to poverty and wretchedness.”

“Things may change tomorrow.”

The trio fell asleep in the lap of these flattering illusions. Manuel awoke at daybreak; the light of the dawn filtered in through the spaces of the wattle that served as roof, and with this pale glow the interior of the Black House assumed a sinister aspect.

They slept in a bunch, rolled up in a ball of rags and newspaper sheets. Some of the men sought out the women in the semi-gloom, and their grunts of pleasure could be heard.

Near Manuel a woman whose features betrayed idiocy as well as physical degeneration, begrimed and garbed in patches, was cradling a child in her arms. She was a beggar, still young,—one of those poor wandering creatures who roam over the road without direction or goal, at the mercy of fate.

The opening of her dirty waist revealed a flat, blackish bosom. One of the gipsy youths glided over to her and seized her by the breast. She laid the infant to one side and stretched herself out on the floor....

Just before the dawn of one April day the cold was so terrible inside the Black House that they made a fire. The flames leaped high, and at the moment least expected the wattle roof blazed up. At once the fire spread. As the canes burned they burst with an explosion. Soon a vast flame had risen into the air.

The denizens escaped in terror. Manuel, JesÚs and Don Alonso made their way quickly through the Paseo de los Pontones to the Ronda.

The blazing roof shone through the dark night like a gigantic torch. Soon, however, it was extinguished, and only sparks were left, leaping and flying through the air.

The three walked along the Ronda. Yonder they could see the long lines of gas lanterns, and at intervals, luminous points like shining islands dotting the obscurity. On the solitary Ronda could be heard, very rarely, the hastening footsteps of some passerby and the distant barking of the dogs.

It occurred to Manuel to go to La Blasa’s tavern. Instead of taking the Paseo Imperial, they entered Las Injurias through a lane lit up by oil lamps and skirting the Gas House.

Black and red smoke rose from the lofty chimneys. The round paunches of the tanks were down near the ground, and around them rose the girders, which, in the darkness, produced an eerie effect.

La Blasa’s tavern was not open. Shivering with the cold they proceeded along the Ronda. They passed a factory whose windows filled the gloom of the night with the violent brilliance of arc lights.

In the midst of this silence the factory seemed to roar, belching clouds of smoke through the chimney.

“There shouldn’t be any factories,” burst out JesÚs with sudden indignation.

“And why not?” asked Don Alonso.

“Because there shouldn’t.”

“And how are people going to live? What’s going to become of business if there aren’t any factories?”

“Let it suffer, as we’re suffering. The earth ought to provide enough for all of us to live on,” added JesÚs.

“And how about civilization?”

“Civilization! Much good civilization does us. Civilization is all very good for the rich. But what does it mean to the poor?...”

“And electric light? And steamships? And the telegraph?”

“Yes, what about them? Do you use them?”

“No. But I have used them.”

“When you had money. Civilization is made for the fellow with money, and whoever hasn’t the hard cash,—let him starve. Formerly, the rich man and the poor got their light alike from the same sort of lamp; today the poor man continues with his humble lamp and the rich man lights his house with electricity; before, if the poor man went on foot, the rich man went on horseback; today the poor man continues to go on foot, and the rich man rides in an automobile; before, the rich man had to dwell among the poor; today, he lives apart; he’s raised a wall of cotton and can hear nothing. Let the poor howl; he can’t hear. Let them die of hunger; he’ll never learn of it....

“You’re wrong,” protested Don Alonso.

“Hardly....”

The distant barking of the dogs could still be heard. It was getting colder with every moment. They walked through the Rondas of Valencia and Atocha.

The solemn mass of a General Hospital, its windows illumined by pallid lights, rose before them.

“Inside there, at least, a fellow isn’t cold,” murmured the Snake-Man in a jovial tone that echoed like a painful plaint.

It was beginning to grow light; the grey mists of morning were scattering. Over the road some ox-carts came creaking. Far off the hens were cackling....

CHAPTER VIII

The Municipal Dungeons—The Returned Soldier—The Convent Soup

Several times Manuel, JesÚs and Don Alonso slept in churches. One night, after the trio had retired in a chapel of San Sebastian, crowded with benches, the sexton threw them out and handed them over to a couple of officers. Don Alonso tried to show the guards that he was not only a respectable person, but an important one as well. While he was thus engaged in argument, JesÚs escaped by the Plaza de Santa Ana.

“You can tell all that to the court,” answered the guard to the Snake-Man’s protestations.

They made their way through a nearby street and entered by a gate before which burned a red lamp. They climbed a narrow stairway into a room where two clerks sat scribbling. The clerks ordered Don Alonso and Manuel to be seated upon a bench, which both made haste to do most humbly.

“You, the older, what’s your name?” asked one of the clerks.

“I?” said the Snake-Man.

“Yes, you. Are you deaf, or an idiot?”

“No. No, sir.”

“Well, you look it. What’s your name?”

“Alonso de GuzmÁn CalderÓn y TÉllez.”

“Age?”

“Fifty-six.”

“Married or single?”

“Bachelor.”

“Profession?”

“Circus artist.”

“Where do you live?”

“Up to a few days ago....”

“Where do you live now, I’m asking you, you imbecile.”

“Why, at present....”

“Write ‘without fixed residence,’” suggested the other clerk.

They then registered Manuel, whereupon he and the older man returned to their benches without a word, deeply speculative upon the fate that awaited them.

Officials of the department strolled around the room, chatting; now and then would be heard the tinkling of a bell.

Soon the door opened and a young woman came in with a mantilla over her shoulders. Her eyes were filled with great agitation.

She went over to the two clerks.

“Can you send somebody over ... to my house.... A physician ...? My mother just fell and broke her head.”

The clerk blew out a puff from his cigar and made no reply. Then, turning about so as to face the woman, and staring at her from crown to toe, he answered with an epical coarseness and bestiality:

“That belongs to the Emergency Hospital. We’ve got nothing to do with such cases.” He turned away and continued to smoke. The woman’s eyes roved in fright through the room; she finally decided to leave, mumbled good night in a breathless voice to which nobody replied, and disappeared.

“The ink-spilling pettifoggers! The beasts!” muttered Don Alonso in a low voice. “How much would it have cost them to send some guard to accompany that woman to the Emergency Hospital!”

Manuel and the Snake-Man spent more than two hours on the bench. At the end of this time the guards escorted them to another room in which was a tall man with a black beard combed in chulo fashion; he looked like a gambler or a croupier.

“Who are these persons?” asked the man, in an Andalusian accent.... As he twirled his moustaches, a diamond ring on his finger shot dazzling gleams.

“They’re the fellows who’ve been sleeping in the San Sebastian church,” said the guard. “They haven’t any home.”

“Begging your pardon,” interrupted Don Alonso. “By sheer accident....”

“Well, we’ll give them a home for a fortnight,” said the tall man.

Before Don Alonso could utter a word one of the guards shoved him rudely out of the room. Manuel followed him.

The two guards made them descend the stairways and put them into a dark room where, after some groping, they located a bench.

“Well, better times are coming,” said Don Alonso, sitting down and heaving a deep sigh.

Manuel, despite the fact that the situation was by no means a comical one, was seized with such an impulse to laugh that he could not contain it.

“What are you laughing at, sonny?” asked Don Alonso.

Manuel could not explain the reason for his laughter; but after a long siege of this hilarity he was left in a funereal mood.

“What would JesÚs say if he were here!” muttered Manuel. “In the house of God, where all are equal, it is a crime to enter and rest. The sexton hands a fellow over to the guards; the guards thrust a fellow into a dark cell. And who’s to know what they’re going to do to us! I’m afraid they’ll take us off to prison, if, for that matter, they don’t hang us altogether.”

“Don’t talk nonsense. If they’d only give us a bite to eat!” moaned Don Alonso.

“They must be considering that.”

It must have been about one or two in the morning when the door to this pig-pen was opened. The Snake-Man and Manuel were led by two guards into the street.

“Say, where are you taking us?” inquired Don Alonso, a little scared.

“Keep on moving ahead,” replied the guard.

“This is an outrage,” muttered Don Alonso.

“You walk ahead, unless you want to march tied elbow to elbow,” snarled the guard.

They crossed the Puerta del Sol, continued through the Calle Mayor and stopped before the Municipal Police Headquarters. To the left of the causeway, by a narrow stairway, they had to descend to a room with a low ceiling which was lighted by an oil lamp. There were a number of high cots where ten or a dozen guards were asleep in a row, with their clothes and shoes on.

From this room they descended another tiny stairway to a very narrow corridor, one of the sides of which was divided into two cages with huge gratings. Into one of these they thrust Don Alonso and Manuel, locking the gate after them.

A man and a knot of gamins surrounded them curiously.

“This is an outrage,” shouted Don Alonso. “We’ve done nothing that gives them a right to imprison us.”

“Neither did I,” grumbled a young beggar who, according to report, had been caught asking an alms. “Besides, it’s impossible to stay here.”

“What’s the trouble?” asked Manuel.

“One of these fellows has made a mess. He’s sick and naked. They ought to take him to the hospital. He says they’ve robbed him of his clothes. The kids, though, say he gambled them away in the cell.”

“And so he did,” declared one of the ragamuffins. “We were sent up for two weeks. When we left prison, just as we had reached the gate, they grabbed us all again and brought us here.”

By the light from the corridor could be made out, in the rear of that cage, several men on the floor.

Thrown upon a bench near the wall, naked, his legs curled up to his belly, the sick man was huddled into a threadbare cape; every move of his laid bare some part of his person.

“Water!” he begged, in a thin voice.

“We’ve already asked the sergeant for some,” said the beggar. “But he doesn’t bring it.”

“This is savagery!” roared the Snake-Man. “This is barbaric.”

As no one paid any attention to Don Alonso, he decided to subside into silence.

“That guy over there,” added the ragamuffin with a laugh, “has syphilis and the mange.”

Don Alonso sank deeper than ever into his melancholy and uttered not a word.

“And what are they going to do with us?” asked Manuel.

“They’ll shoot us off to prison for a couple of weeks,” answered the beggar.

“Do they eat there?” asked the Snake-Man, rising from the depths of his self-absorption.

“Not always.”

There was a general silence. All at once there was a hubbub of voices in the passageway; soon it became a pandemonium of women’s shrieks, curses and weeping.

“Hey, there, quit your shoving!”

“Damn the cuss!”

“Get along with you, now. Get along,” ordered a man’s voice.

This was a rout of some thirty women who had been arrested on the streets. They were all locked up in the cage next to the men. Some were shouting, others were groaning, and still others brought forth their choicest repertory of abuse, which they hurled at the heads of the Police Captain and the Chief of the Board of Health.

“There isn’t a sound one among them,” observed Don Alonso.

It seemed to Manuel that he made out the voices of La Chata and La Rabanitos. After locking up the women a sergeant came over to the men’s cage.

“SeÑor Sergeant,” spoke up Don Alonso. “There’s a fellow here who’s sick.”

“Well, what do you want me to do?”

“SeÑor Sergeant, perhaps you could do me a favour ...” added Manuel.

“What?”

“If there’s any reporter around for police news, just tell him that I’m a compositor on El Mundo and that I’ve been arrested.”

“Very well. I’ll do so.”

Before a half hour had gone by the sergeant returned. He opened the gate and turned toward Manuel.

“Hey, you. Compositor. Out with you.”

Manuel stepped out, passed by the cage that held the women, saw La Chata and La Rabanitos in a knot of old prostitutes which contained a negress (all of them horrible), and hurriedly climbed the stairway to the room in which the reserve guards were sleeping. The sergeant opened the door, seized Manuel by the arm, gave him a kick with all his might and pushed him into the street.

The City Hall clock was at three; it was drizzling; Manuel went off by the Calle de Ciudad Rodrigo to take shelter in the arches of the Plaza Mayor, and as he was weary, he sat down upon a door step. He was about to doze off when a man who looked like a professional beggar took a seat beside him. The fellow said he was a soldier back from Cuba,—that he could find no employment and, as far as that was concerned, was no good for work any more, as he had got used to living in constant flight.

“After all,” continued the returned soldier, “I’ve got my luck with me. If I haven’t died this winter, I’ll never die.”

The two spent the night huddled close to one another, and the next morning went to the Plaza de la Cebada on a foraging expedition. The soldier pilfered some nuts from a pile, and this constituted the breakfast of the two comrades.

Later they went down by the Toledo bridge.

“Where are we going?” asked Manuel.

“Here, to a Trappist monastery near Getafe. They’ll give us a feed,” said the soldier.

Manuel quickened his pace.

“Let’s hurry.”

“There’s no need. They bring out the food after they themselves have eaten. So that even if you run, you don’t gain anything by it. We must take our time.”

Manuel moderated his gait. The soldier was a common sort; his nose was thick, his face wide, his moustaches blond. He wore a pointed hat, clothes covered with patches, an old muffler rolled around his throat, and in his hand, a stick.

They reached the monastery, walked into the porter’s lodge and sat down before a table where six or seven men were already waiting.

“Can you write verses?” asked the soldier of Manuel.

“I? No. Why?”

“Because a few days ago I came here with a gentleman who was really as dead hungry as ourselves. While we were waiting for the meal he asked the name of the rector and wrote some verses to him that were as pretty as you’d wish. Then the rector sent for him and gave him plenty to eat and drink.”

“It’s a shame that we can’t write a rhyme. What’s the rector’s name?”

“Domingo.”

Manuel tried hard to find a word ending in ingo, but could not. And when the lay brother entered with a large pot that he deposited upon the table, Manuel forgot his task completely.

The brother then brought wooden spoons and distributed them among the beggars. Of these, all but one brought forth large cups; the solitary exception was a repulsive type with a swollen lower lip that protruded and was covered with ulcers.

“Wait a second, brother,” said the soldier, before the other fellow could thrust his spoon into the pot. “We’re going to put the food into the cover of the pot and we’ll eat from there.”

“I don’t know what you’ve got against me!” mumbled the beggar.

“You? You’ve got a lip that looks like a beefsteak.”

Manuel and the soldier then ate and after thanking the lay brother they left the monastery and stretched themselves out on the field in the sun.

It was a beautiful May afternoon; the sun shone strong and steady. The returned soldier recounted some anecdotes of the campaign in Cuba. He spoke in a violent fashion, and when anger or indignation mastered him, he grew terribly pale.

He talked of life on that island,—a horrible life; forever marching and marching, barefoot, legs sunk into swampy soil and the air clouded with mosquitos whose bites left welts on your skin. He recalled a dingy little village theatre that had been converted into a hospital, its stage cluttered with sick and wounded. The army officers, even before the fantastic battles—for the Cubans always ran off like hares—would dispute the distribution of crosses, and the soldiers would make fun of the battles and the crosses and the bravery of their leaders. Then the war of extermination decreed by Weyler, the burning mills, the green slopes that in a moment were left without a bush, the exploding cane, and, in the towns, the famished populace, the women and children crying: “Don Lieutenant, Don Sergeant, we’re hungry!” Besides this, the executions, the cold slaughter of one by the other with the machetes. Between generals and lower officers, hatred and rivalry; and in the meantime the soldiers, indifferent to it all, hardly replying to the sharpshooting of the enemy, with the same affection for life that one can feel for a discarded sandal. There were some who said: “Captain, I’ll remain here.” Whereupon their guns were taken from them and the others proceeded. And after all this, their return to Spain, almost sadder than the life in Cuba; the whole ship loaded with men dressed in striped cotton duck; a ship laden with skeletons, and every day five, six or seven who died and were cast into the waves.

“And the arrival at Barcelona! Hell! What a disillusion!” he concluded. “A fellow would be waiting for some sort of reward for having served his country,—hoping for a little affection. Eh? Not a thing. Lord! Everybody looked at you as you went by without paying the slightest attention. We disembark in port as if we’re so many bales of cotton. On the ship we had said to ourselves, ‘We’ll be swamped with questions when we get back to Spain.’ Nothing like it. Nobody was in the least interested in what I had gone through in the Cuban thickets.... Go and defend your country, ha? Let the papal Nuncio go and defend it! So that he can afterward die of hunger and cold, and have somebody say to him: ‘If you had any guts, the island wouldn’t have been lost.’ It’s too damned much, I say! Too much!...”

The sun was already sinking in the west when the soldier and Manuel got up and went off toward Madrid.

CHAPTER IX

Night in the Paseo de la Virgen del Puerto—A Shot Rings Out—Calatrava and Vidal—A Tango by La Bella PÉrez

“On nights when it isn’t very cold,” said the soldier, “I sleep in that grove near the Virgen del Puerto. Would you want to go there today?” he added.

“Sure. Come on.”

They were at the Puerta del Sol, so they went down the Calle Mayor. It was a rather misty night; the mist was bluish, luminous, and tempered the wind; the electric globes of the Royal Palace shone in this floating haze with a livid light.

Manuel and the soldier descended the Cuesta de la Vega and entered a little wood that runs between the Campo del Moro and the Calle de Segovia. Here and there an oil lantern shed its pallid glow among the trees. They reached the Paseo de los MelancÓlicos. Near the Segovia bridge flames were leaping from the furnaces of a grease factory that had been installed in a hut. From the Paseo de los MelancÓlicos they descended into the hollow, where they took refuge in a shed and prepared to go to sleep. It was cool; several mysterious couples were moving around in the vicinity; Manuel curled up, thrust his hands into his trousers pockets and was soon sound asleep.

The shrill blare of bugles awoke him.

“That’s the Palace Guard,” said the soldier.

The pale glow of dawn flushed the sky; soft and grey quivered the first light of day.... Suddenly, from very near, came the discharge of firearms; Manuel and the soldier jumped to their feet; they rushed out of the shed ready for flight. But they saw nothing.

“A young chap has just committed suicide,” cried a man in a smock as he ran by Manuel and the soldier.

They approached the place whence the sound of the shot had come and beheld a young man, well dressed, lying on the ground, his face covered with blood, a revolver clutched in his right hand. There was nobody in the vicinity. The soldier drew near to the corpse, lifted the youth’s right hand and removed two rings, one of them with a diamond. Then he opened the dead man’s coat, went through the pockets, found no money and fished out a gold watch.

“Let’s be off before anybody shows up,” said Manuel.

“No,” answered the soldier.

He returned to the shed where they had passed the night, dug a hole into the ground with his fingernails, wrapped the rings and the watch in a sheet of paper, buried them, and stamped down the earth with his foot.

“In war times, war methods,” murmured the soldier, after having executed this manoeuvre with extraordinary rapidity. “Now,” he added, “lie down and pretend to be fast asleep, in case anybody should happen along.”

In a few moments came a drone of voices from the hollow, and Manuel saw two guards pass by the shed on horseback.

People were hastening toward the scene of the suicide. The civil guards, after a search of the corpse, found a letter addressed to the judge in which the deceased declared that nobody was responsible for his death.

Manuel and the soldier joined the curious onlookers.

When they picked up the body and bore it off, Manuel asked:

“Shall we go back and dig the stuff up?”

“Wait for everybody to disappear.”

The place was soon deserted. The soldier then disinterred the rings and the watch.

“I think this diamond ring is all right,” he said. “How are we to find out?”

“At a jeweller’s.”

“If you were to go to a jeweller’s in those rags of yours, with a diamond ring and a gold watch, it’s very likely that you’d be reported and taken off to prison.”

“Then what are we going to do? Could we pawn the watch?” asked Manuel.

“That’s dangerous, too. Let’s go and hunt up Marcos Calatrava, a friend of mine whom I got to know in Cuba. He’ll get us out of the fix. He lives in a boarding-house on the Calle de Embajadores.”

Thither they went. A woman came to the door and informed them that this Marcos had moved. The soldier made inquiries in a tavern on the ground floor of the house.

“Old Cripple! Sure I know him. I should say!” declared the tavern-keeper. “Do you know where he hangs around nights? In the Majo de las Cubas tavern, over on the Calle Mayor.”

To Manuel and the soldier this was one of the longest days in their lives. They were frightfully hungry and the thought that the sale of these rings and the watch could provide them with all they wanted to eat, and that fear kept them from satisfying this imperative need, drove them to distraction. They dragged themselves wearily through the streets, returning from time to time to inquire whether the cripple had yet arrived.

Toward evening they caught sight of him. The soldier walked over to him, saluted, and the three passed to the back of the tavern to talk things over in a corner.

“I’m expecting my secretary any moment,” said Marcos, “and he’ll arrange matters. In the meantime, order supper yourselves.”

“You do the ordering,” said the soldier to Manuel.

Manuel did so, and to add to the delay, the waiter said that the supper would be some time in coming.

While the soldier conversed with Calatrava, Manuel observed the latter closely.

Calatrava was a rare specimen, appearing at first sight almost ludicrous; he had a wooden leg, a very narrow face, as dry and black as a smoked fish; two or three scars graced his forehead; his moustaches were stiff and his hair kinky. He wore a bright-coloured suit with very wide trousers and reeled along on his natural leg as well as on his artificial; his jacket was short, somewhat darker than his trousers; his cravat was of red and his straw hat tiny.

In a beery voice Marcos ordered a few glasses. They drank them down, and soon a dandy came in, wearing yellow shoes, a derby and a silk handkerchief around his neck.

At sight of him, Manuel cried out:

“Vidal! Is that you?”

“Yes, my boy. What are you doing here?”

“Do you know this young man?” asked Calatrava of Vidal.

“Yes. He’s a cousin of mine.”

Marcos explained to Vidal what the soldier wished.

“This very instant,” answered Vidal. “It won’t take me ten minutes.”

And indeed, within a short time he returned with two pawn-tickets and several notes. The soldier took them and divided them; Manuel’s share was five duros.

“Listen to me,” said Calatrava to Vidal. “You and your cousin stay here and have supper; you must have plenty to talk about. We’ll go off to somewhere else, for we’ve a few things to discuss ourselves. Take your cousin to your house for the night.”

They left, and Manuel and Vidal remained alone.

“Have you had supper?” asked Vidal.

“No. But I’ve already ordered it. And your parents?”

“They must be all right.”

“Don’t you see them?”

“No.”

“And El Bizco?”

Vidal turned ashen white.

“Don’t mention El Bizco to me,” he said.

“Why?”

“No, no. I’m horribly afraid of him. Don’t you know what happened?”

“What?”

“Dolores La Escandalosa was killed.”

“I didn’t know a thing.”

“Yes. The old woman was slain in a house called The Confessional, over toward Aravaca. And do you know who murdered her?”

“El Bizco?”

“Yes. I’m sure of that. El Bizco used to go to The Confessional to meet a gang of tramps like himself.”

“That’s true. He told me so.”

“Have you spoken to him?”

“Yes. But that was a long time ago.”

“Well, the newspapers that reported the crime say that the murderer must have been of extraordinary strength, and that the woman must have gone there as if to a rendezvous. It was El Bizco, I’m certain.”

“And haven’t they caught him?”

“No.”

Vidal was immersed in thought; it could be seen that he was making every effort to control himself. The waiter brought supper. Manuel attacked the meal voraciously.

“Boy, what a small appetite you have!” commented Vidal smiling, his calm having returned.

“Lord! I was as hungry....”

“Let’s go out and have a coffee now.”

Vidal paid the bill, they left the tavern and went into the CafÉ de Lisboa.

While they were sipping their coffee, Manuel scrutinized Vidal. The youth’s hair was very lustrous; it was parted in the middle and curly tufts fell over his ears. His movements betrayed a vast aplomb; his smile was that of a self-consciously handsome man; his neck was round, without any salient muscles. He spoke with a sympathetic ring in his voice, always smiling; but his shrewd, treacherous eyes betrayed the falsity of his speech; their expression did not harmonize with the affability of his affectionate word and his ingratiating smile. One read in them only distrust and caution.

“And you,—what are you doing?” asked Manuel, after having examined him carefully.

“Pse!... I manage to exist....”

“But on what? How?”

“There are certain deals, my boy.... Then, women....”

“But do you work?”

“That depends upon what you call work.”

“Man! I mean, do you go to a shop....”

“No.”

“Have you a sweetheart?”

“At present I have only three.”

“Christ! What luck! Where do you find them?”

“Around here. In the theatres, at dances.... I’m secretary of the Bisturi, and member of the Paloma Azul and the Billete.”

“And through them you manage to get acquainted with plenty of women?”

“Of course! And then, as far as women are concerned, it’s all a matter of gab.... Sometimes you’ve got to show them that you’re sore, and let ’em feel your fist....”

“You sure live the life!... If I could only do the same!”

“Why, it’s as easy as pie!... I’ve got a peach of a kid now,—the prettiest skirt in the world and just crazy over me. She gave me this watch chain.... But the best of all is that there’s a certain party hanging around me, pestering me, and I’ll bet you could not guess who.”

“How could I know? Some marchioness, maybe.”

“No. A marquis.”

“What for?”

“Nothing. He’s courting me.”

Manuel stared in astonishment at Vidal, who smiled mysteriously.

“Are you tired?” asked Vidal.

“No.”

“Then let’s go to the Romea.”

“What have they got over there?”

“Dancing and pretty women.”

“Sure. Let’s go.”

They left the CafÉ and went up the Calle de Carretas.

Vidal bought two orchestra chairs. It was Sunday.

The air inside the theatre was dense, hot, saturated with smoke and with the respiration of hundreds of persons who during the entire afternoon and evening had piled into the place. There was a full house. The piece was as stupid as could be, infested with silly, coarse jests delivered in the most insipid manner imaginable, amidst the interruptions and the shouts of the public. The curtain descended and immediately there appeared a girl who sang, in a shrill voice that went horribly off key, a pornographic ditty without an atom of wit. Then out came a painted, ugly old hulk of a Frenchwoman in a huge hat. She advanced close to the footlights and intoned an almost endless ballad of which Manuel understood not half a word, with the refrain:

Then she executed a few turns, kicking one of her legs till it touched her hat, and disappeared. The curtain again descended; a moment later it rose, revealing La Bella PÉrez, who was greeted with a round salvo of applause. She sang a popular song very badly, smiling through several errors, and retreating to the wings after the number. The piano of the orchestra then spiritedly attacked a tango, and La Bella PÉrez issued from the wings in a ballet skirt, a toreador’s cape around her shoulders, a Cordovan hat thrust down over her eyes, and a cigar between her lips. After the piano had concluded these introductory measures, she threw the cigar into the pit for the orchestra patrons to snatch at, removed her cape, and remained with her skirt tightly gathered back by her hands, thus revealing in sharp outline her stomach and her thighs. At the very first notes of the tango a religious hush fell upon the assemblage; a breath of voluptuousness stirred through the auditorium. Every face was aglow, every glance fixed glitteringly upon the stage. And the belle went through her dance with a frowning face and teeth tightly clenched, stamping her heels, causing her powerful hips to stand out when she would fold her skirts about her like a victorious banner. From this beautiful feminine body issued a stream of sex that maddened every spectator. At the end of the dance she placed the hat upon her stomach and gave her hips a wiggle that brought a roar of lust from the entire audience.

“That’s the girlie!”

“There’s what you call wiggling!”

“What a shape!”

The dance came to an end upon a volley of applause.

“Tango! Tango!” shrieked the spectators as if possessed.

Manuel, his eyes moist with enthusiasm, was shouting and clapping his hands wildly.

“Hurrah for lust!” bellowed a youth at Manuel’s side.

La Bella PÉrez repeated the tango. Behind Manuel and Vidal was a girl rocking a child in her arms; the tot’s face was covered with scabs. The girl, pointing to La Bella PÉrez, crooned to the child:

“See. See mamma.”

“Is she the mother of this little girl?” asked Manuel.

“Yes,” answered the nurse.

Without knowing why, Manuel suddenly lost all enthusiasm for the dance, and even imagined that behind the coat of paint and the rice powder that covered the dancer’s face, lay a mass of rash and pimples.

Manuel and his cousin left the theatre. Vidal boarded at a house on the Calle del Olmo.

They walked off through the Calle de Atocha and at the corner of the Calle de la Magdalena they encountered La Chata and La Rabanitos, who recognized them and called to them.

The two girls were waiting for La Engracia, who had gone off with a man. In the meantime they were quarreling. La Rabanitos was swearing the most solemn oaths that she was no more than sixteen years old; La Chata asserted that she was going on eighteen.

“Why, I heard your own mother say so!” she shouted.

“But why should my mother say any such thing? You sow!” retorted La Rabanitos.

“But she did say so, you cheap bitch!”

“When did I go into the business? Three years ago. And how old was I then? Thirteen.”

“Bah! You were on the streets ten years ago,” interrupted Vidal.

The girl whirled about like a snake, eyed Vidal from top to bottom and then, in a rasping voice, snapped:

“As for you, you’re of the sort that takes a front seat and lets your friends go hang.”

The hearers greeted this circumlocution with applause, for it revealed La Rabanitos’s imaginative qualities. Thus calmed, she drew from her apron pocket her wrinkled, grimy certificate, and passed it around.

La Engracia came upon them while they were busied with the task of deciphering the certificate.

“What do you say? You treat,” suggested Vidal to her. “Have you got any money?”

“Money! Yes! The housekeepers ask more and more. I don’t know where they’ll stop at.”

“Come on. If only for a little nip.”

“Very well. Come along.”

The five of them trooped into a bun shop.

“This gentleman I was with,” said La Engracia, “is a painter, and he told me that he’d give me five pesetas per hour for posing as a model in the nude.”

La Rabanitos was scandalized at the news.

“What good are you going to be as a nude model when you haven’t any tits?” she shrilled, in her high voice.

“Naw! I suppose you’ve got them!”

“When it comes to that, I may not have any special reason for getting a swelled head,” sneered La Rabanitos. “But I’ve got a better figure than you.”

“Hell you have!” retorted the other, and affecting to pay no attention, she turned to chat with Vidal. La Rabanitos then took possession of Manuel and recounted her troubles with all the seriousness of an old woman.

“Boy, I’m all in,” she confessed. “Naturally weak.... And then men are so brutal.... When they find a girl like that, they do as they please, of course, and everybody steps all over you.”

Manuel heard what La Rabanitos was saying; but exhaustion and drowsiness precluded him from understanding. Two other girls entered the shop with a couple of vagabonds; one of the young men had a pudgy face, clouded eyes and an expression compounded of ferocity and cynicism. All four were drunk. The women began to insult everybody in the place.

“Who are those women?” asked Manuel.

“A couple of scandalous dames.”

“See here, let’s be going,” suggested Vidal to his cousin, with the prudence that characterized him.

They left the bun shop; the girls went off toward the heart of the city while Manuel and Vidal walked through the Calle de Ave MarÍa as far as the Calle del Olmo. Vidal opened the gate to his house.

“Here’s the place,” he said to Manuel.

They climbed to the top floor. There Vidal struck a match, thrust his hand underneath the door, drew forth a key and opened. They crossed a passageway, and Vidal said to Manuel:

“This is your room. See you tomorrow.”

Manuel took off his rags, and the bed seemed so soft to him that despite his weariness it was a long time before he fell asleep.