A short while later the eventuality predicted by Cæsar occurred. The
Liberal ministry met a crisis, and after various intermediate attempts
at mixed cabinets, the Conservatives came into power.
Cæsar had no need to insist with the Minister of the Interior. He was
one of the inevitable. He was pigeon-holed as an adherent, from the
first moment.
The Government had given out the decree for the dissolution of the
Cortes in February and was preparing for the General Election in the
middle of April.
Cæsar would have gone immediately to Castro Duro, but he feared that if
he showed interest it would complicate the situation. There were a
lot of elements there, whose attitude it was not easy to foresee; Don
Platón’s friends, Father Martin and his people, Amparito’s father, the
friends of the opposing candidate, Garcia Padilla. Cæsar thought it
better that they should consider him a young dandy with no further
ambition than to give himself airs, rather than a future master of the
town.
He wrote to Don Calixto, and Don Calixto told him there was no hurry,
everything was in order; it would be sufficient for him to appear five
or six days before the election.
Cæsar was impatient to begin his task, and it occurred to him that he
might visit the towns that made up the district, without saying anything
to anybody or making himself known. The excursion commenced at the
beginning of the month of April. He left the train at a station before
Castro. He bought a horse and went about through the towns. Nobody in
the villages knew that there was going to be an election; such things
made no difference to anybody.
After the inauguration of a new Government there was a little revolution
in each village, produced by the change of the town-council and by the
distribution of all the jobs that were municipal spoils, which passed
from the hands of those calling themselves Liberals to the hands of
those calling themselves Conservatives.
Cæsar discovered that besides the Liberal García Padilla, there was
another candidate, protected by Father Martin La-fuerza; but it looked
as if the Clericals were going to abandon him. In a town named Val de
San Gil, the schoolmaster explained to him, with some fantastic details,
the politics of Don Calixto. The schoolmaster was a Liberal and a frank,
brusque, intelligent man, but he formed his judgment of Don Calixto’s
politics on the prejudices of a Republican paper in Madrid, which was
the only one he read.
According to him, Señor Moncada, whom nobody knew, was nothing more
than a figure-head for the Jesuits. Father Martin Lafuerza was getting
possession of too much land in Castro, and wanted everything to belong
to his monastery. The Jesuits had learned of this and were sending young
Moncada to undo the Franciscan friar’s combinations and establish the
reign of the Loyolists.
In another place, named Villavieja, Cæsar found that the four or five
persons interested in Castrian politics were against him. It seemed that
the Conservative candidate they wanted was the one protected by Father
Martin, who had promised them results greatly to their advantage.
In general, the people in the towns were not up on politics; when Cæsar
asked them what they thought about the different questions that interest
a country, they shrugged their shoulders.
In the outlying hamlets they didn’t know either who the king was or what
his name was.
The only way in which the trip was of service to the future candidate
was by giving him an idea of how elections were carried on, by teaching
him who carried the returns to Don. Calixto, and showing him which of
these people could be warranted to be honourable and which were rascals.