Benito PErez Galdos

THE CRISIS.

An hour later Monina and Tachana were playing on the floor with paper birds and boxes that Leon had made for them, while he restored order and sorted out what could be saved from the effects of the invasion. The noise of an opening door made him look up and he saw before him his father-in-law, the Marquis de TellerÍa. He looked aged, and his face, more lined and wrinkled than usual, betrayed some nervous tension or perhaps the neglect of some cosmetic he was accustomed to use; his eyes, dim with tears or want of sleep, blinked and twinkled like little lamps that flicker for want of oil and struggle with a feeble smoky flame. His dress only remained unchanged and was as precise and neat as ever; but his voice, formerly bold and decided, as that of a man who has always something to say that is worth hearing, was low, timid and deprecatory. Leon felt greater pity than ever for the old man, and he offered him a chair.

“I am suffering from fever,” said the marquis, putting out a hand that Leon might feel his pulse. “For the last three nights I have not slept at all; and last night I thought I should have died of exhaustion and shame.”

Leon asked one or two questions as to the cause of his distress and sleeplessness.

“I will tell you all about it. From you I can have no secrets,” said TellerÍa sighing deeply. “In spite of all that has happened between you and MarÍa—which I deplore with all my heart—oh! but I still hope to see you reconciled.... In spite of everything you will always be a son to me—a dear son.”

So much mellifluous flattery put Leon on his guard.

“Well, dreadful things have been happening. Your hair will stand on end when you hear it all, my dear son. But I have a good deal of fever, have I not? My temperament is so sensitive and nervous, and I cannot bear these great agitations. God grant you may never go through in your own house such scenes as have taken place in ours these last few days! I have come on purpose to tell you, and you see I do not know how to begin. I am afraid.... I dare not.”

“I understand it all perfectly,” said Leon, interrupting this long preamble. “The moment has come when it is no longer possible to carry on the system of drifting. Everything in this world must come to an end, even the dishonest farce of those who live by spending what they have not got. A day comes when the creditors are tired of waiting, when the workmen who have been put off from day to day—upholsterers, tailors, drapers, purveyors of all kinds—send a cry up to heaven, and ceasing to ask, proceed to take; ceasing to grumble, begin to rail.”

“Yes,” said the marquis closing his eyes. “That day has come. They would not listen to my good counsel and now the catastrophe has fallen; a hideous catastrophe, of which it is impossible to foresee the consequences. In one word, my dear fellow, we are in danger of having an attachment put upon the house.... I do not care for the loss of all the fashionable rubbish that Milagros has collected from half a hundred shops without paying for it; what I feel is the scandal, the disgrace! The day before yesterday a dealer who supplies us with groceries, and who has been to the house again and again, set up the most terrific hubbub on the stairs. I heard his torrent of abuse in my study, and rushed out in a fury, but he retreated into the street where he continued his harangue. Yesterday the man we hire the carriage from refused to serve us any more, and the worst of it is that he wrote me a most insolent letter.... I will show you....”

“No, no. There is no need,” said Leon, staying the trembling hand with which the old man was fumbling in his pockets. “I can imagine what the poor wretch would say.”

“Yesterday I was summoned before the magistrate; those rascally shop-keepers—fuel merchants, upholsterers, and dealers of every degree, had put in above five and twenty claims against me. It is horrible to have to talk of such low things; the words seem to burn my mouth, and my face tingles with shame. Tell me—say that you pity me.”

“I do indeed,” said Leon moved to sincere commiseration.

“I do not pretend to excuse myself,” the marquis went on with melodramatic pathos and closing his eyes. “Every resource is exhausted and every door is closed. Of our jewels nothing is left—not even the pawnbroker’s tickets. A money-lender to whom I applied yesterday, the only one in whom I had the slightest hope, gave me a very rough reception and showed me out with speeches that I would rather forget. Oh! it is dreadful to have to tell you such things, Leon, and I do not know how I find courage to say them; I go round and round the treadmill of misery into which I have been thrust, and still it seems to me that it is all a lie—that it cannot be I who have to bear such things—I, AgustÍn Luciano de Sudre, Marquis de TellerÍa, the son of one of the noblest gentlemen of Extremadura and heir to a name that has been handed down through centuries with dignity and honour.”

“Yes,” said Leon stiffly, “it might well be a lie! and the most improbable part of it is that after having been rescued already, more than once, by generous hands from this abyss of disgrace and misery, you have fallen into it again.”

“You are right, but I am weak; and the fault is not mine alone,” said the marquis as meekly as a schoolboy. “My wife and my sons have given me a push that my fall might be the quicker and more certain. If I were to tell you the worst, the darkest feature of it all—indeed my dear Leon, my only friend, I must tell you all, though these are things that a man only tells to the pillow he sleeps on, and blushes even then. But I have no secrets from you ... still it is hard, very hard ... all the blood of the Castilian nobles that flows in my veins curdles at the thought, and I feel as if an invisible hand held my lips.”

“But if it is not the aim and object of your visit, you need say nothing about it.”

“Nay, it has to be said, bitter as it is. You know that Gustavo has been very intimate for some time with the Marquesa de San SalomÓ. Well, Gustavo—but I do not believe that it was his idea, I believe it was some cunning suggestion of my wife’s—Milagros—I hardly know how to speak of it—what words to use in speaking of the members of my own family. In short, Pilar de San SalomÓ gave Gustavo a certain sum of money, for what purpose I do not know, but a considerable sum, which my miserable wife, on some inconceivable pretence, chose to appropriate; they made their own arrangements; whether there was any promissory-note or written agreement I did not hear. But my son, who is a gentleman, finding himself seriously compromised, had a violent scene with his mother only last evening about this money, and you cannot conceive the row there was in the house. Gustavo and Polito were ready to fight. I had to strain every nerve to keep peace. At last Gustavo went off to his own room; I, suspecting something worse, followed him and found him with a pistol at his head, about to shoot himself.... Then there was another scene and a fresh outburst, with the addition, this time, of his mother’s horror.... Oh, what a night! My dear fellow, what a dreadful night! To crown all, the servants, in despair of being paid a farthing, have left the house after insulting us with a chorus of abuse, calling us ... But no, there are words which I cannot utter.”

The marquis was quite beside himself; great drops of sweat stood on his forehead and his breast heaved like that of a man who has been carrying a terrific burthen. Leon found no words to break the pause that ensued. It was Don AgustÍn who at length collected his failing strength and, putting on the most dismal and appealing face that he could command, exclaimed:

“Leon, my son, save me, save me from this depth of misery! If you do not I shall die ... we shall all die—save my noble name!”

“How?” asked Leon coldly.

“Do you not see that I am disgraced?”

“Certainly; but I do not see how I am to prevent it.”

“But could you bear to see your relations begging their bread?” said his father-in-law, employing a figure of speech that he thought must prove effective.

“I am quite willing to save my relations from beggary. But if you expect me to pay the debts you have incurred by wastefulness, dissipation and vanity, so that you may be free to begin again and get into fresh debt, and go on living in the same scandalous way, I am obliged to say very plainly: No. Not once, but several times, have I extricated you from a similar predicament. I have heard endless promises of amendment, endless schemes of reform; but they have all resulted in greater extravagance than ever. You, the marquesa, and Polito have eaten up a good quarter of my fortune; I can do no more.”

Leon’s resolute energy startled the hapless marquis, who sat stunned; the bluntness of his son-in-law’s refusal deprived him for a time of the power of speech; at last, stammering and hesitating like a man who has lost count in telling his beads, he managed to speak.

“I am not asking your charity ... that is not in my nature ... whenever I have appealed to your generosity ... you have had my bond ... and interest.”

“The bond is a mere formality, the interest purely visionary; I have accepted the hypothesis simply and solely to give a gift the semblance of a loan. What security can you give who have neither land, nor houses, not even a stick that does not belong to your creditors? What I have done for you has been anything rather than really generous, SeÑor; it is a crime. I have not succoured the needy but sheltered the vicious!”

“Good God!” cried the marquis quaking with astonishment; “remember—what you have done for me—for my sons and my wife was the natural outcome of your affection for us ... but Leon, for the last time ... this is the critical moment of my life. The honour of my house is at stake.”

“Your house has no such thing as honour; it has had none for a long time past.”

The marquis drew up his effeminate head; his wrinkled cheeks were purple, and his eyes flashed as though a sudden light had blazed up in front of him; it almost seemed as if there might be a grain of dignity still lurking in the soul of this man, weak as he was, in mind as in body, a spark of honour urging him on like a dastardly soldier who, after keeping out of danger in a battle, tries in the last extremity to escape the taunts of his comrades by seeking a glorious death. But Leon’s ascendancy over the poor coward was so great that he could not find strength to speak and could only groan, while his head fell again on his breast and he listened dully to his son-in-law. He was but a dry and blasted tree, awaiting the fatal axe.

“No honour,” repeated Leon, “unless we give the word a purely conventional and fictitious sense. True honour does not consist in repeating a set of formulas to protect ourselves against weakness and meanness. It is based on noble deeds, on prudent and respectable conduct, on domestic honesty and an unbroken word. Where these do not exist who can talk of honour? Where everything is falsehood, insolvency, vice and folly how can there be honour? Since we are here in strict privacy supposing I remind you of your wife’s proceedings, of Polito’s, nay of your own?”

The marquis put out a deprecatory hand as if to implore his son-in-law to do nothing of the kind. But Leon thought it right to strike home.

“I entreat you,” said TellerÍa penitently, “not to go on with your list of grievances. I regret them bitterly; I do not deny that I have committed follies ... who has not? It is the way of the world. Now that I am sinking, Leon, either put out a hand to save me or leave me to perish; but do not vilify me, do not make my fate more cruel than it is. Of course I have no right to appeal so frequently to your generosity. Still, you must reflect that your circumstances and mine are widely different. I have children, and you have not.”

“But ...” Was he going to say: “‘But I may have some day?’”

The marquis sat for a few minutes looking at the two little girls playing in the middle of the room.

“Well,” said Leon. “I will make you an allowance sufficient to enable you to live decently, but this is all I can do. I have not a gold mine; nor, if I had, would it ever fill up the gulfs that you open at my feet from time to time.”

Don AgustÍn turned pale, and as he sat gazing at the floor he mumbled with his jaws as though he were turning over the dry husk of a fruit.

“An allowance!” he muttered. In fact the idea stuck in his throat, and though common gratitude forbid his making any overt objection his changed expression plainly showed that this eleemosynary annuity, doled out by pity, revolted his pride and embittered his blood. So complete was his moral obliquity that, while he felt no degradation to ask a loan on fictitious security, tantamount in fact to a distinct purpose of never repaying it, he was wounded to the quick by this offer of a pension which he called “throwing his bread in his teeth.” Besides, his selfish pride made him recalcitrant to any scheme which did not extricate him from his immediate dilemma. What did he care for living the decent and respectable life that Leon spoke of? What does the spendthrift care for the future? His first anxiety is to avoid scandal at a great crisis, so that, when it is past, he may go on again with a bold front and a confident stride along the same road of ruin and insolvency which was so familiar to him. However, the marquis had too much respect for propriety and too much genuine courtesy to allow him to betray his feelings; on the contrary, he expressed himself grateful for “the St. Bernard’s mess of pottage”—the pittance that his son-in-law had offered.

“An allowance,” he said trying to make the best of it, “you are most liberal; I am grateful for your foresight. But in point of fact it will not get me out of the scrape. The ship is wrecked, and your allowance is land in sight a hundred miles away.”

He could find nothing else to say; but he was paler than ever, and did not raise his eyes from the ground. Vexation and disgust had changed his features as if he were suddenly and miraculously aged. His lips were pinched between two deep wrinkles, and his moustache, all unstiffened, stuck out in every direction, as threatening as a hedgehog’s spines. His cheeks, of a dull and faded pink, were furrowed and worn, and under his eyes were deep ridges of puffy white flesh; it almost seemed as though his neck was leaner and his ears larger and more transparent, while his temples had taken the yellow hue of a mortuary taper; he seemed to have fallen into decrepitude. However, after a few moments of reflection over his hapless fate, he raised his head, and forced his lips into a grimace in which a hypocritical smile hardly concealed the foaming of rage.

“You are, I am sure, most kind and considerate,” he began. “But if we owe much to you, on your part, you have ample reason for your good offices. We cannot be expected to overlook the fact that you have made our beloved MarÍa a miserable woman.”

“That I have made her miserable,” said Leon quietly.

“Yes, most wretched! though we have kept it quiet out of consideration for you—too much consideration. At last our feelings are too much for us and we cannot sit by in silence when we see that angel’s sufferings. Do you mean to say that you do not see that the grief of her separation from you will bring her to the grave?”

There is no creature on earth however insignificant that does not try to bite or sting when it is trodden under foot. The marquis, wounded in his pride and cheated of his wild hopes, had recourse to his sting.

“This is too complicated a question to be discussed in a hurry. Do you, as her father, demand an explanation of my action? Because, if so, you have been a long time thinking of it. MarÍa and I parted more than a month ago.”

“But the fact that I have delayed it need not prevent my doing so now,” retorted Don AgustÍn, plucking up his courage now he thought that he had laid his hand on one of those weapons which give a coward the advantage over the most valiant foe. “I am a father, and a devoted one. There is no name for your behaviour to MarÍa, that angel of goodness! In the first place you assailed her with your atheism and almost broke her heart by your materialistic views. Do you think that the piety of a woman, brought up as she has been, in the true faith, is not even deserving of respect when she desires to practice it with all due fervour? Without beliefs and without faith, do you expect to govern the world or a family by the laws of an atheistical Utopia?”

“And what in God’s name do you know about governing the world, or even a family?” cried Leon, laughing bitterly at his father-in-law’s solemnity. “When did you ever know anything about religion? When had you any beliefs, or faith, or anything of the kind to boast of?”

“Very true; I am not learned in such matters,” replied TellerÍa conscious of his incompetence. “I am ignorant; but I cherish certain traditions which have been stamped on my heart from childhood, that I have never forgotten in spite of my shortcomings; and by the light of those principles I can declare that you have behaved atrociously to MarÍa, and that by forcing her to this separation you have trampled on every sound principle and all that the human conscience holds most sacred.”

This hackneyed scrap of newspaper bombast exasperated Leon more perhaps than the speaker’s pretensions merited. Pale with wrath, he turned upon him at once:

“Of what good are your moral laws and your interpretation of the human conscience? A beautiful thing indeed is your reverence for tradition. Why! I was such a fool as to endure for four years a life of mental asphyxia in a world where everything is dogma and formula! Morality, religion, honour!—Words! mere words! Wealth even is an empty mockery; the very laws are mere formula—made brand-new every day and never obeyed; the whole thing is a miserable farce—a stage, where the actors are never weary of cheating each other and the rest of the world in their lying parts, and making believe to be virtuous, pious, or noble. This is your model society, worthy to be preserved intact to all futurity!... No one must lay a finger on it, or even find fault with it. I, you say have failed in respect to that herd of hypocrites who succeed in hiding their depravity from the million, and are clever enough to pass for creatures with a soul and conscience—I, who have seen and suffered, and said nothing, not even in opposition to the aberrations of a wife, who, though less guilty, is more fanatical than most—I, you say, have broken the laws of morality! How and in what respect I ask you?

“Nay, but I will tell you. I have been such a fool as to yield to the contemptible formulas which in your world pass for principles; I have looked on in silence and been content to screen vice and extravagance, supplying money to a spendthrift father, and wasteful mother, and libertine sons. I have encouraged dissolute living, have lent support to every vice—nay even to crime. These sins I have committed, and I own them to my shame!”

Provoked at first, and lashing his fury with his own words, Leon struck the table, threatened his father-in-law with his fist, till the old man shrank almost to nothing as he sat through this philippic with his eyes fixed on a water-jar that stood on the table, wondering whether it were large enough for him to hide in.

Monina and Tachana, terrified by Leon’s vehemence, gathered up their paper playthings and, daring neither to laugh nor to cry, crept silently away into a corner of the room.

“I only spoke as a father,” said the marquis in so faint a voice that it might really have come from the bottom of the vase.

“And I spoke as a man wounded in his tenderest feelings, a husband exiled from his hearth by a cruel inquisition, and cast into the loneliness of practical celibacy by gross fanaticism and heartless bigotry. Those moral laws of which you talk so much condemn me, I know, for what they most absurdly call my atheism; but the true atheist, the hardened materialist, are those who trick themselves out in borrowed robes to be my accusers, and who would be just as ready to dress themselves up as harlequins to dance at a fancy ball. But though I should scorn to defend myself before them, I would have them know that I am the victim and not the executioner, and that I have quite made up my mind henceforth to defy the censure of hypocrites and the attacks of detractors. I mean to go my own way; I know where to find truth and the really immutable laws. I can scorn dogmas and traditions! It will be a pleasure to me to show my contempt, not in secret but publicly, for a tribunal that deserves no veneration, and a verdict pronounced in accordance with the clamour of a crowd devoid of all moral sense. Composed of agitators, hypocrites, rakes, idlers and bigots; of antiquated fops and decrepit youth, of foolish women and men who traffic in public moneys and private consciences; of would-be authorities who are but apes, of men who would sell everything—even their honour—and others who would sell themselves, but that no one will buy them; of worldlings who put on an air of sanctity—mere bags of rottenness with human faces; of cowards, sneaks and renegades; of all in short who would like to constitute the basis of society and who do not hesitate to insist that all mankind ought to be moulded after their image and likeness. Well! let them stay where they are! I will withdraw—I have withdrawn—leaving my hapless wife behind me, by her desire, not my own, I can look on from afar at the edifying spectacle. They understand each other—they live from day to day, spending what is not their own; paying for church ceremonies, and encouraging vice; dividing their inheritance between sacristans and ballet-girls. Families are either dying out, or perpetuated by generations of unhealthy descendants; the most serious facts and laws of life are laughed to scorn; virtue and true piety are contemned, while they preach in bombastic rhetoric a scheme of morality of which they are utterly ignorant and a God whose laws they have not studied. They, indeed, are atheists, a thousand times over, who measure the sublime purposes of the Almighty by the puny standard of their mean and selfish souls!”

The burning words had parched his lips; he took the jar from the table and drank some water. His hapless opponent had shrunk so completely into nothingness that he had ceased to think of the vase as a conceivable hiding-place; his eyes now rested on a match-box as though to say: “How happy should I be if only I might disappear into that!”

Being a man of the world with a multitude of commonplaces at his command, even on the most critical occasions, TellerÍa was trying to find some words that might release him from the present dilemma, or at any rate cover his discomfiture.

“I will not attempt to imitate you,” he began, pulling himself together and clearing his throat. “I shall indulge in no violent language. I have appealed to the laws of morality and to them I still appeal. You have sinned against my daughter and against society at large ... that is how I feel it, and how I must continue to speak of it. I go back to the insult you have offered to MarÍa, who is a faithful and blameless wife, and to the underhand manner of your separation. In short, I do not believe that it was MarÍa’s bigotry that moved you to it, I strongly suspect ...”

But the marquis did not finish his sentence. Tachana was heard crying. She and Monina had crept behind a chair and had been peeping through the bars in great alarm at the two men who were arguing so fiercely. Tired at last of this amusement they had begun to quarrel; Ramona had slapped her companion.

“Whose children are those?” asked the marquis eagerly, “that red-haired child is Pepa’s, surely?”

“Yes; Monina, come here.”

“Suertebella is here is it not?”

“Quite near.”

“To be sure!” The marquis had an idea—slow of wit as he was and rarely able to boast of an idea of his own; for his logic, like his phrases, was borrowed ready made. He felt a strange light flash through his murky brain; yes! yes! he had an idea, and nothing on earth should persuade him to abandon it! He rose.

“Good-bye,” he said shortly, putting on a face so solemn as to be quite ludicrous.

“Good-bye,” answered Leon in no way disconcerted.

“We will meet again and renew our discussion of the laws of morality,” added Don AgustÍn, “of my daughter’s position—your desertion—her honour—all these are very serious matters.” And as he drew himself up he seemed to grow taller; the match-box, the water-jar, the chair he sat in, nay, the room itself seemed too small to hold him.

“Very well, discuss it at once!”

“No. We must be calm, very calm. My daughter must put herself under the protection of the law. I shall communicate with my family on the subject. It is a most serious matter ... my honour....”

“Ah! To be sure; your honour!” said Leon with a laugh. “Very good; we will try to find it, and when we have succeeded we can talk about it. Good-bye.”

The marquis departed. Though somewhat crestfallen at the failure of his application for money, he was very proud of himself. There was something in his mind which made him swell as he thought of it; the stairs, the doorway, were not big enough for him—even the street, the fields, the whole wide world! It was the idea which had slipped in hardly visible and expanded within him, suggesting with miraculous fertility a thousand accessory possibilities of the most flattering description, raising him in his own estimation, and lowering others. How comforting it is to have an idea! especially when it condones our own sins by showing us the sins of others, and allows us to say with satisfaction: “Ah! we are all alike, all alike!”