The shock of his mother's death, and quite as much the story of Eugenia
she had told, left Monsalvat for some days in a veritable stupor. He
just let himself live on, listlessly yielding to the stream of passing
hours much as water-grasses in mid-river bend and curl to the current.
His mind was a blank, incapable of thinking, unresponsive alike to
memory and to hope. At intervals, indeed, in some chance moment of
awakened introspection, it occurred to him that this present spiritual
passivity must be very like Nacha's habitual condition--a barely
conscious drift down the course of events, thoughtless, will-less,
purposeless.
But such spiritual torpor could not last long in a man of Monsalvat's
vigor. Eventually he began to feel the need of action, and two
immediate projects seemed to present themselves: he must find his
sister, and he must attend to the restoration of his tenements.
One morning the broker he had commissioned to execute the mortgage
announced that he had drawn up the necessary papers, and that they were
ready for his signature. A bank was advancing forty thousand _pesos_
on the security of the improved property. Monsalvat gaily hurried to
announce the news to his tenants. To his surprise he saw no results of
the various measures toward cleaning up which he had suggested to the
janitor.
"Why didn't you carry out my orders?" he asked the latter, a lean,
loose-jointed immigrant from Aragón, whose arms bobbed up and down
against his enormously wide hips as he talked with a slightly
Andalusian lisp that had the intention of humor in it.
"I have, sir, I have. But these people--why, sir, what can a fellow do
with them? Take a look at them! Born pigs, pigs they will remain."
His labored jocularity failed, however, in quite concealing the
uneasiness the man was feeling at this unexpected visit from his
employer. As Monsalvat started for the door of the tenement the janitor
resumed:
"Going to talk to them? What's the use? They'll only lie to you. What
such folks need is the stick, I'm telling you, and not kind words, nor
favors."
But brushing him aside, Monsalvat went on into one of the apartments on
the ground floor, the door of which was open. In it lived an Italian,
with his wife and two children. The man, a laborer on some municipal
building job, was away at work. Monsalvat asked the woman if the
superintendent had conveyed his orders to her.
"There! Didn't I tell you?" the janitor commented triumphantly, at
the reply that he had not. And he added, with a burst of ill-natured
laughter, "The people, the sovereign people--pah!"
Monsalvat invited the fellow to leave him alone with the tenant.
"How much did you pay this month?" he inquired when the man was gone.
Foreseeing a raise in her rent, the woman put her apron to her eyes and
began wailing about the poverty, debts, and sickness in her family.
Monsalvat repeated his question.
"Twenty _pesos_," she replied, trembling.
Monsalvat had ordered his caretaker to reduce the rents by a half,
and his face flashed with anger. The woman, however, misinterpreted
her landlord's expression, which she thought due to surprise at the
smallness of the sum. Now, surely, he was going to raise the rent. Oh,
this America!
So from apartment to apartment Monsalvat went on pushing his inquiries.
Some of the tenants were not in, but he managed to visit a dozen or
more of them. It was the same story everywhere. He hurried down to the
superintendent's quarters and ordered him to assemble all the tenants
in the courtyard. When they had gathered there, he denounced the
trickery of his agent and discharged him on the spot.
"Your rents are reduced by one-half," he then explained to the crowd.
"But this will not be for long, because I am going to make some
expensive alterations. I want you to be comfortable in clean homes,
with plenty of air and sunlight. I want you to live like human beings,
and not like animals. When the contractors begin work here you will
probably have to move to some other house; but later when this building
has been made a fit and pleasant place to live in, you can return here."
To his astonishment, his words were welcomed with no enthusiasm
whatever. Instead of pleasing his listeners, indeed he seemed to have
insulted them. Some commented with a shrug of their shoulders; others
began whispering together. One old woman burst out weeping. A man who
talked with a Galician accent voiced the protest that was in all their
minds. They were being put out of the house, just as a pretext for
higher rents afterwards. Calling the man by name, Monsalvat tried to
explain.
"Don't you understand? I am thinking only of your own good. If you live
under hygienic conditions, with plenty of air and light, you will have
less sickness, and lose less time from your work. Life will be that
much easier for you, anyway."
But the man did not understand. If they were satisfied, why force
on them something they did not ask for? They lived like pigs? Well,
had they ever lived any other way? Hygiene and air were all right
for rich people. But poor folks had always gotten along without air;
and as for hygiene,--what was hygiene anyway but some new fad of the
white-collared crowd? Anyway, if poor people had a hard life, the
rich needn't try to improve it with their uplift. Everybody knew only
too well what rich people were like. If they were easy with you one
moment, it was only to take it out on you at some other time. Mr.
Landlord could leave them alone with his lower rents and his remodelled
tenements. They wouldn't have the lower rents, and they wouldn't move a
stick or stone out of there.
The Galician looked defiantly at Monsalvat as he talked. His auditors,
evidently a majority of the tenants in the building, loudly applauded
his concluding words.
"He's right! He's right!"
And Monsalvat saw more than one hostile glance coming his way.
Disheartened now, he did not care to reply. What could he say that he
had not said? Merely assuring them again that the month's rent for each
apartment would be ten _pesos_ instead of twenty, he went away, leaving
his tenants to continue discussing their grievances together.
As he walked toward his lodgings, he tried to convince himself that
this incident was not a proper cause for discouragement; that, on the
contrary, it emphasized the need of going on, of struggling with these
people, even against their wills, for their own good. Their ignorance
was the natural consequence of such absorbing poverty. When had culture
ever existed apart from a certain amount of material wellbeing? And
how really poor in every sense were these unfortunate tenants of his;
their minds dulled by the grind of daily toil, their vision blurred to
the most obvious beauties of life. It was understandable, indeed, that
they should mistrust everything, even the best intentions of people who
really had their welfare at heart. But he was sure of his road now; all
doubt and faltering had left him. The difficulties he encountered only
spurred him to new energy and a light was shining in his heart.
He had reached the steps leading up to his house when someone, from
a carriage window, beckoned to him to stop. It was Ruiz de Castro,
smart, dapper, gloved and perfumed as usual, bearing himself with his
customary correctness and as always looking quite the conqueror. And
following him out of his conveyance came Ercasty, who greeted Monsalvat
with an affected courtesy quite in contrast with his obvious annoyance
at this encounter.
"My dear fellow," Ruiz exclaimed, "you have no idea what an uproar
you caused the other night. I have been busy apologizing for you ever
since." And he laughed with his characteristic mannerliness, trying to
appear amused as though it were all a joke. The doctor, however, eyed
Monsalvat with aggressive hauteur, gazing skyward with intentional
rudeness, whenever Fernando began to speak.
"Certainly it would never have occurred to anyone but Fernando
Monsalvat to defend those women seriously." Castro continued: "All the
ladies have decided you must be the wildest libertine in Buenos Aires.
Something of a reputation, eh?"
"The injustice of such an inference must be rather obvious," said
Monsalvat. "It offends me, however, only in the abstract, as something
wrong, and therefore ugly. So far as I am concerned personally, it is
nothing to me at all.
"I shall continue being what I am--regardless of what people think."
The doctor, much annoyed, suddenly abandoned his passive attitude. It
was incompatible with his veneration for "society" to admit that an
individual could be other than what "society" declared him to be.
"That is sheer nonsense," he broke in aggressively. "What counts is
public opinion. A man is, in any practical sense, exactly and only what
people consider him to be."
Monsalvat took no notice of the interruption.
"I am not sorry that I spoke up in defense of those poor women," he
said, addressing his remarks to Ruiz de Castro alone. "I assure you, we
do not know them. To us they seem like animals, things without souls,
without personalities. Well, we're wrong. They are human beings. They
feel, and love, and hate, like any one of us. But even though it should
not be so, granted they are virtually animals, whose fault is it?"
"It's idiotic to blame society for the manner of living of these
people," the doctor asserted roundly. "They behave as they do because
they are degenerates."
"No, not degenerates: victims! Many of them try to work. Pitiful
salaries, with debts they can't avoid, drive them into the power
of vice. A few of them may, indeed, be degenerates--off-spring of
feeble-minded or alcoholic parents for whom, in a more roundabout way,
we are perhaps just as much to blame. But, on the whole, the cause
of the social evil, as of other evils, is in me, in Ruiz, in you, in
the man going by there in that automobile, in the factory owner, in
the store proprietor, in the criminal laws which give a sanction to
economic injustice, in our moral ideas, in our conceptions of life--in
our civilization, in short. The fact is, we have no human sympathy,
no sense of justice, no pity. Countless numbers of these poor girls
might still be saved, because they have not yet completely lost their
self-respect. But what have we ever done to rehabilitate one of them?
Do we ever go into the places where they live with any purpose but a
shameful one? Do we ever extend the hand of Christian fellowship to
the outcast? Can any one of us say that he has never, even by tacit
complicity, helped to bring about the degradation of any woman? No, we
are all the accomplices, witting and unwitting, of an infinitude of
crimes. And yet those girls are our sisters; creatures, as people say,
with souls to save, unfortunates feeling the same call to life that we
all feel, and, like all of us, destined to the death that engulfs all
our hopes and all our sorrows...."
Ruiz de Castro, from temper of mind, and in spite of the circumstances
in which life placed him, was not insensible to an idealistic appeal.
His face showed the impression Monsalvat's words made on him. Not so
his companion, however, who in this case, as in all others, was quite
indifferent as to whether Monsalvat was right or not. For him the
important point was that the whole discussion annoyed him, as something
improper, in bad taste. It was Ercasty's belief that an educated man
like Monsalvat, a "gentleman" in other words, ought to have the ideas
and sentiments of his class. In defending workmen and prostitutes, and
other kinds of low people, Monsalvat, in his opinion, was behaving
like a vulgar plebeia. The doctor would have conceded to anyone the
right to defend fend such unfortunates in the conventional way--with
condescending charitableness, or with witty paradoxes; but this fellow
was talking like a social agitator; attacking society, insulting
class, ignoring tradition. What were policemen's clubs for except to
use on such dangerous lunatics? As Ruiz and his companion bowed him a
cold "good day," Monsalvat went up toward his front door. Chancing to
turn around before going in, he caught a glimpse of the doctor still
sputtering abuse in his direction. For his own part he pitied the man,
with that exultant sense of superiority which a new vision brings.
As it was still only eleven o'clock, he decided to go at once to the
house where his mother had lived, for a further talk with Moreno. At
the door he met the latter's daughter. Monsalvat had first noticed
Irene Moreno the night of his mother's death, and he had taken a liking
to her. She had been so gentle, so affectionate towards Aquilina
Severin, so skillful in tending her, so ready to do anything she could.
The sight of the poor child now caused him a most painful impression:
slight of frame, but graceful, nervous, agile, under a shock of almost
blonde hair, she seemed a pretty little flower that was being trampled
upon, bruised and soiled in that life of the tenements. To atone
for the utter incompetence of the father, she and her mother sewed,
embroidered, and in other ways made frantic efforts to assemble the
pennies needed for the daily bread of that household. To Irene fell
the care of her six younger brothers and sisters; and it was she who
delivered her mother's and her own needle work at the stores.
"I am going next door for a moment," the girl replied to a question
from Monsalvat, looking up at him shyly out of her dark, steel blue
eyes. "There is a woman there who has just lost her little boy. He was
only two years old. The poor thing is a widow and has no work."
"Won't you take her something from me--from us both?"
"I have something already," Irene answered. Knowing the circumstances
of the Moreno family, Monsalvat wondered how much such alms could
amount to; and Irene, though much embarrassed by his insistence,
could not evade confessing that she was taking the woman one _peso_,
the total of her ready cash. Monsalvat put into her hand all the
money he had in his pocket, not daring, however, to suggest that she
keep that poor little _peso_ for herself. Then he followed her back
into the Moreno apartment. Moreno was out, as usual. That systematic
ne'er-do-well was scarcely ever at home if he were sober enough to be
elsewhere. His wife, too, was absent, for the moment, trying, as Irene
explained, to place her eldest son as an errand boy somewhere. With the
children running in and out, hungry, squawling, half-naked, the rooms
were in a disorder, which Irene, visibly troubled at being taken thus
unawares, kept trying to excuse, betraying her uneasiness further by a
constant fluttering of the eyelids which, to Monsalvat, somehow seemed
particularly appealing.
Monsalvat turned the conversation, as soon as possible, upon the
subject of his sister, whom Irene said she also had known. "Eugenia was
such a generous girl," she added. "I grew to be very, very fond of her.
And she dressed so wonderfully! People said she had piles of money. But
she was always doing something for somebody. She never forgot to bring
us some little present whenever she called on Aquilina; and I remember,
too, that she never went away without telling me to be a good girl.
That always amused me. But Eugenia was so pretty!"
"And did she ever mention me?" Monsalvat asked anxiously.
"Yes," said Irene, "often! Though she seemed to feel you did not much
approve of her."
"And where is she now? Do you think your father will really find her?"
Irene reddened, and seemed reluctant to answer. When Fernando repeated
his question she replied that her father certainly did not know where
Eugenia was. No one did, for that matter, as Eugenia never would tell
her address. Moreno was just trying to get money out of Monsalvat. "And
please don't give him any more," she begged. "He only drinks it up, and
he always makes a lot of trouble for us here in the house when he gets
drunk."
In Irene's opinion, it was useless to look for Eugenia. No one had any
idea as to where she was living. It would be better just to wait. She
would turn up sooner or later to see her mother. Then they would tell
her about the poor woman's death, and let her know that her brother was
anxious to see her.
"And tell her, too, as simply as you can, Irene, that I hold nothing
against her; and that I want her to come and live with me."
Monsalvat spoke with an emotion which, without his being aware of it,
found a responsive chord in Irene's starved little heart. As their eyes
chanced to meet, Monsalvat divined that this poor child was in love
with him.
"And you," he exclaimed, "why haven't you some kind of work?"
"I've looked for work, outside, but without much success. We take in
sewing, you see, mother and I. She knows how to embroider, and she is
teaching me how to do it. But we make so little at it."
Irene's eyes filled with tears, as memories of her hardships rose
before her. While Monsalvat sat silent, moved by what he heard, she
told him that Moreno sometimes beat her; but that was nothing to the
agony she endured when the children cried with hunger.
"I can't bear it. It breaks my heart to hear them."
And she began to sob. Monsalvat tried to comfort her, and talked to her
awhile, as a brother might. Suddenly he got up to leave. Nacha's image,
persistent and irresistible, was taking possession of him. Irene gave
a quick glance at him and saw that he was going. Seizing his hand, she
threw herself on the ground before him.
"Take me with you!" she cried. "I will be your servant, your slave,
anything you wish, because I know you will help mother and father--and
the children. It will be your bread they eat. Only take me away,
please. I love you, I respect you. If you don't take me, what's to
become of me? I'll go away with the first man who comes along. Yes, I
will! I'll be like Eugenia--but at least the family won't starve."
"Please get up," said Monsalvat, embarrassed. They stood facing one
another. Saddened and silent, he looked at her.
"A year ago I would have taken you with me, Irene. Now it is
impossible. But you don't need to humiliate yourself to persuade me
to help your people. They shall have everything I can give them. Now,
promise me you will not do anything foolish. I shall be your friend,
and come to see you."
Irene, without replying, went into a corner of the room, and began
to weep heart-rendingly. What could he do? Profoundly distressed,
Monsalvat went away.
All day the thought of Irene troubled him; but towards evening he
decided he must make two calls: one upon Nacha, the other upon Torres.
It was impossible to wait longer; he must see Nacha, and as to Torres,
he needed his help in looking for Eugenia.
He went to Nacha's apartment. His jerk at the bell brought him suddenly
face to face with Arnedo. He turned cold.... The latter surveyed him
from head to foot, in utter astonishment.
"So it's true she was carrying on with you, is it? What did you come
here for? To find her? Don't you know I threw her out ten days ago?
She's probably running around the streets, like the rest of her kind."
He tried to make his tone scornful; he did not want to betray the anger
Monsalvat's presence aroused in him. But Monsalvat had recovered his
self-command. Quite serenely he declared that he had had nothing to do
with Nacha. The proof of this was that he had not until that moment
known that she had left. If there had been anything between them,
wasn't it rather strange that ten days should pass without their seeing
one another?
"Just the same," said Arnedo, yielding to this argument, "you have no
business to come here. And you can get out at once. If you don't, I'll
throw you down those stairs!"
Monsalvat was unruffled. He looked into Arnedo's eyes with so quiet
and peaceable an expression that the latter could not but restrain his
violence.
"Why do you take things that way?" said Monsalvat. "I wish you would
listen to me with a little patience. I did come to see Nacha, not with
the intentions you may have supposed, but for her good. I know that she
wants to lead a decent life. Don't you think it is only just and human
to encourage her? If you have ever cared for her, don't stand in her
way now! At least let her save herself, if she can!"
Arnedo listened, his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the ground.
At first he wanted to laugh; for this all seemed so ridiculous, and
sentimental. But suddenly he became serious, as though Monsalvat's
words were sinking in.
"But it isn't only on Nacha's account that I came. I also wanted to
talk with you. I wanted to ask you where Eugenia Monsalvat is."
He spoke gravely and in a tone which seemed to make an impression on
the young _patotero_.
"My mother has died, and she asked me to look for her. I want to keep
my promise that I would. No one knows where my sister is, Arnedo. Do me
a kindness and tell me."
"I don't know where she is. If I find out...."
As they parted, they shook hands. Arnedo was beginning to understand
Monsalvat. He knew that this man, who seemed to have forgotten the
scene in the cabaret, was no coward; that there was in him something
that he had known in no one else. He went with Fernando to the elevator
and again shook hands with him.
Monsalvat found Torres in his office. In order not to add to his
friend's shame and grief, the doctor listened without looking up.
Monsalvat had found it easy enough to speak of his sister to Arnedo;
but to speak of her to Torres--what an effort it cost him! And he had
something even harder to do; he must tell him he was also looking
for Nacha. Torres would think that he was in love with the girl, and
perhaps laugh. Yet, when Monsalvat, with a tremendous effort, told him
that there was need of finding Nacha, too, Torres gravely replied that
Nacha must be found.
For he, too, was beginning to understand Monsalvat.