Their Son; The Necklace Part 19

"Never. Or--when you bring me the necklace I asked you for!"

Struck dumb, he peered at her, because he realized the girl meant what she said. She added:

"Then----"

The door closed. Enrique Darles blundered, weeping, down the staircase.

IV

Darles got up next morning very early and went wandering out into the street. He was completely done up. The night had been one of terror and insomnia; and when day had dawned, finding him in his miserable little room--a room whose only furniture was a bureau covered with books and magazines, a rickety pine table and a few rush-bottomed chairs, all mean and old--the realization of his solitude had struck him with the violence of a blow. He had felt that profound agitation which psychologists call "claustrophobia," or the fear of enclosed s.p.a.ces.

For a long time he wandered about, absorbed in vacillations that had neither name nor plan. He hardly knew himself. His conscience had been cruelly wrung in a few hours of suffering; and from this savage convulsion of the soul unsuspected developments were emerging, enormous moral unfoldings, filled with terrifying perplexities. His despair had loosed a stupendous avalanche of problems against the bulwark of those moral principles which had been taught him as a child. And each of these questions was now a terrible problem for him. Where, he wondered, does virtue end? Where does sin commence? And if all our natural forces should go straight toward the goal of happiness, why should there be any desires that codes of formulated ethics should judge depraved and sinful? Why should not everything which pleases be allowed?

When he reached the Calle de Atocha, he met a friend of his, called Pascual Canamares. This friend was a medical student like himself. The two young fellows greeted each other. Canamares was on his way to San Carlos.

"Do you want to come along with me?" he asked. "I'll show you the dissecting-room."

Darles went along with his friend. Canamares noticed Enrique's pallor.

"You don't look a bit well this morning," said he.

"No, I didn't sleep much last night."

"Maybe you were out having a good time?"

"No. On the contrary, I cried all night."

There was such a depth of manly pain in this reply that Canamares did not dare probe the matter any further.

The dissecting-room, cold and white, produced some very lively sensations in Darles. Floods of sunlight fell from the tall windows, painting a wide, golden border over the tiled walls. A good many corpses lay on the marble tables, covered with blood-stained sheets; and all these bodies had shaven heads and open mouths. Their naked feet, closely joined together, produced a ghastly sensation of quietude. An indefinable odor floated in the air, a nauseating odor of dead flesh.

Darles felt a slight vertigo which forced him to close his eyes and leave the room. For more than an hour he wandered about the gravely-echoing, s.p.a.cious cloisters of San Carlos. A strange sadness hovered over the building; the damp, old building which once on a time had been a convent and now had become a school--the building where the vast tedium of a science unable to free life from pain was added to the profound melancholy of a religion which thinks only of death.

When Pascual Canamares left his cla.s.sroom, he asked Darles to go and dine with him. Enrique accepted. It was just noon. Canamares usually ate at a little tavern in the Plaza de Anton Martin. This was a gay little establishment, with high wooden counters, painted red. The two students sat down before a table, on which the hostess had spread a little tablecloth.

"Well, what do you want?" asked Canamares.

"Oh, I don't care. Anything you do."

"Soup and stew?"

"All right."

Canamares ordered, in a free and easy way:

"Landlady! Bring us a stew!"

He was a big, young fellow, twenty, plump and full-blooded, vivacious with that healthy, turbulent kind of joviality which seems to diffuse vital energies all about it. He was very talkative; and in his picturesque and frivolous chatter lay a contagious good-humor. Darles answered him only with distrait monosyllables. His whole attention was fixed on a few coachmen at the next table. They were talking about a certain crime that had been committed that morning. Two men, in love with the same woman, had fought for her with knives, and one had killed the other. The murderer had been captured. It was a vulgar but intense crime of pa.s.sion; it seemed to have a certain barbarous charm which, in its own way, was chivalric, since there had been no foul play in the crime. The fight had been fair and open. And the student admired, he even envied those two brave men who, for the sake of love, had not shrunk before the solemnity of a moment in which the death-dealing wound coincides with the knife-thrust which carries a man off to the penitentiary.

As they left the tavern, Pascual took unceremonious leave of his companion.

"I'm going to leave you," said he, "because no one can have any fun with you. Hanged if I know what's the matter with you, to-day! Why, you won't even listen to a fellow!"

Then he took his leave. Unmoved, Enrique saw him walk away; but after that he felt a painful sensation of loneliness. Yes, and this loneliness had come upon him because he had been frank enough not to hide his ugly state of mind, because he had let all the melancholy of his soul s.h.i.+ne forth freely from his eyes. And in that moment he understood that to be thoroughly sincere is tremendously expensive, for all sincerity--even the most innocent--invariably exacts a heavy price.

That evening he ate only a very light supper and went to bed early. He lay awake a long time, tortured by a flood of disconnected memories. His father, who represented all his past, and Alicia Pardo, who symbolized his whole present, seemed to be striving for him. The image of the girl at last prevailed.

Little by little he fell to studying the perverse and mocking spirit of the woman, who, even when she had waked up in the morning with him, had looked at him and shrugged her shoulders disdainfully. Well, what had happened? Between them, where had the fault lain? Was the girl naturally a hard-hearted creature, incapable of high and lasting sentiments; or was it that he, himself, quiet and peaceful, had not been able to live up to her illusions?

Scourged by the agonizing tyranny of his will, the student's memory recalled moments, evoked phrases, and once more endowed with new reality all the details of that enchanted night in which it had seemed to him all Madrid had been perfumed with violets. And as the human heart always yearns to forgive the object of our love, Enrique succeeded at last, after much reflection, in convincing himself that Alicia was innocent.

He decided that from the first moment she had been blameless. She had encouraged him to undertake the conquest of her; and afterward completely and with no other wish than to see him happy she had opened her arms to him--Venus-like arms, which had cast about his neck a bond of pity and sweet tenderness. And he, in exchange for such supreme happiness, what had he given?

Accusingly an implacable voice began to cry out in the student's conscience. Alicia, he pondered, was accustomed to the ways of the world; she was a woman of exacting and refined tastes, who adored luxury and understood Beethoven. Many men of the aristocracy wors.h.i.+ped her, making a fas.h.i.+onable cult of her beauty; and more than one famous tenor had sung for her, alone in the intimacy of her bedroom, his favorite _racconto_. The inexorable voice continued:

"And what have you done, Darles the Obscure, to be worthy of this treasure? What merits have you had? Women of such complete beauty as hers seek that which excels--they love strength, which is the supreme beauty of man; strength, which is glory in the artist, money in the millionaire, elegance and breeding in the man of the world, despair in the suicide, courage and outlawry in the thief who boldly dares defy the law. But you, you who are nothing, what do you aspire to? Of what can you complain?"

The student heaved a sigh, and his eyes filled with tears. He was a fool, a shrinking coward, a poltroon. A man who has ruined himself for a woman, or who, to keep her as his own, has committed murder and been sent to prison, may justly complain of her. But _he_, quite on the contrary----

Suddenly Darles shuddered so violently that the electric shock of his nerves made him utter a cry. Deathly pale, he sat up in bed. Since he could not give Alicia either a fortune or the glory of a great artist, he must drink a toast to her with his whole honor--he must steal. This came to him as a terrible revelation, resonant of h.e.l.l. And all at once he understood the enigmatic expression which had shone in the eyes of the girl and had sounded from her lips the last time they had talked together. He had asked her: "When am I going to see you again?" And she had answered: "Never--until you bring me the necklace I have asked you for!"

Now these mystic words clearly reechoed in his mind; now he fully understood them. Alicia was in love with a priceless jewel; and often, thinking about it, she grew very sad. Her sadness was real; he himself had seen it. Perhaps the girl, when she had dismissed him, reminding him of that necklace, had spoken in jest; perhaps it had been in earnest.

Who could tell? At all events, when she had declared that they would never see each other again, she had in a veiled manner expressed her belief that he was a coward, incapable of ruining himself for her.

The feverish eyes of Enrique Darles burned like coals. Why, indeed, should he not steal? Why should he not prove himself brave, capable of everything? At the basis of every great sacrifice lies something superhuman, that confuses and that rends the soul. If he were a thief and could pay with his bravery something that his small, poor money could not buy; if he should ruin his whole career just to please her, should bring down upon his head the rigors of the law and his father's curses, Alicia--so he fondly believed--would love him blindly, with the same sort of frenzy that Balzac's hero, Vautrin, inspired in women.

The voice which until now had been thundering accusations in the student's storm-tossed conscience, now with soft flatterings began to wheedle and cajole him, saying:

"Alicia, your beloved Alicia would be happy with the emeralds of that necklace. If you have no way to buy it for her, go steal it! You're a cowardly wretch if you don't! What does the opinion of the crowd matter to you, egoist that you are? A man incapable of becoming a thief for a woman may love her greatly, but he does not love her to distraction.

What your Alicia desires, you should give her. Have no longer any doubts, but go and steal! Steal this necklace for her and then clasp it about her neck--that neck whose snow so many times in the s.p.a.ce of one night offered its refres.h.i.+ng coolness to your lips!"

These ideas combined to strengthen his more recent impressions--the impression of his visit to the dissecting-room where once more he had seen that nothing matters; and the impression of that crime of jealousy which he had heard talked about in the tavern. And all at once, Enrique Darles felt himself calmed. His future had just been decided. He would steal. Fatality, incarnate in the body of Alicia Pardo, had just mapped out his road for him.

Every evening at sunset, at that hour of mystery when the street-lights begin to s.h.i.+ne and women to seem more beautiful, the student left his lodgings and, pa.s.sing through the Calle Romanos and the Calle Carmen, took his way toward the Puerta del Sol, always full of an idle, loitering crowd which seems to have nowhere to go. He always stopped in Calle Mayor, to cast an eager, timorous look into the jeweler's shop, whose show-window glowed like a bed of living coals.

This calculating, daily contemplation of those treasures completely overturned Enrique's moral standards. He, himself, did not grasp the profound change coming upon him. Steadily this thought of stealing kept growing in his soul, obsessing him, evolving into a resistless, overwhelming determination.

As if to increase his torment, the emerald necklace which served as an advertis.e.m.e.nt for the shop, found no purchaser. It was far too dear.

With his nose pressed against the plate gla.s.s of the window, Enrique suffered long moments of anguish, unable to take his eyes from that abyss, that precipice of gold and velvet at the bottom of which the diamonds, topazes, emeralds, pearls, rubies and amethysts seemed the eyes of a strange mult.i.tude peering out at him. All this time his imagination was developing a mad, adventurous tale. With his prize hidden in his most secret pocket, he would go to see Alicia and would say to her: "Here, take it! Here is your necklace, the necklace that neither Don Manuel nor any of your millionaire aristocrats would buy for you. I, gambling my life, have got it for you! What do you say now?"

And thinking thus, he would close his eyes, seeming to feel that all about him the air was perfumed with violets. And then when he once more opened his eyes, the emeralds of the necklace, green and hard as Alicia's pupils, seemed to say to him: "All your dreams and hopes, all your sweet visionings, shall now come true!" It was the secret voice of temptation, a voice which had transformed itself to radiance.