There was great excitement both in the Cathedral and in the seminary,
everyone discussing from morning till night the news from Madrid, for
these were the days of the September revolution. The traditional and
healthy Spain, the Spain of the great historical tradition had fallen.
The Cortes Constituyentes were a volcano, a breath from the infernal
regions, to those gentlemen of the black cassock who crowded round the
unfolded newspaper, and, if they found comfort and satisfaction in a
speech of Maesterola's they would suffer the agonies of death at the
revolutionary harangues, which dealt such terrible blows at the olden
days. The clergy had turned their eyes towards Don Carlos, who
was beginning the war in the northern provinces; the king of the
Vascongados[1] mountains would be able to remedy everything when he
came down into the plains of Castille. But years passed by, Amadeus
had come and gone, they had even proclaimed a republic! And yet the
cause of God did not seem to advance much, and Heaven seemed deaf. A
republican deputy proclaimed a war against God, challenging Him to
silence him; and so impiety stalked along immune and triumphant, and
its eloquence flowed abroad like a poisonous spring.
[Footnote 1: Provinces of Alava, Guipuscoa, and the lordship of
Biscay.]
Gabriel lived in a state of bellicose excitement--he forgot his books,
he disregarded his future, he never thought now of singing his mass.
What would happen to his career now that the Church was in peril, and
that the sleepy poetry of past ages, that had enveloped him from his
cradle like a perfumed cloud of old incense and dried roses, was on
the point of vanishing?
Often some of the pupils disappeared from the seminary, and the
professors would reply to the inquiries of the curious with a sly
wink.
"They have gone out--with the good sort. They could not see quietly
what was happening--'child's play,' 'follies.'"
But nevertheless such follies made them smile with paternal
satisfaction.
He thought to be himself among those who fled, as the world seemed
to be coming to an end. In certain towns the revolutionary mob had
invaded and profaned the churches; as yet they had not murdered any of
the ministers of God as in other revolutions, but still the priests
were unable to go about the streets in their cassocks for fear of
being hooted and insulted. The remembrance of the archbishops of
Toledo, those brave ecclesiastical princes, implacable warriors
against the infidels, fired his warlike feelings. As yet he had never
been away from Toledo, away from the shadow of its Cathedral; Spain
seemed to him as vast as all the rest of the world put together, and
he began to feel the ardent desire of seeing something new, of seeing
closer all the wonderful things he had read about in his books,
stirring within him.
One day he kissed his mother's hand, without feeling any very great
emotion towards the trembling and nearly blind old woman, for the
seminary had for him more tender memories than the house of his
fathers, smoked his last cigar with his brothers in the garden without
revealing his intentions to them, and that night he fled from Toledo
with a scapulary of the Heart of Jesus sewed into his waistcoat, and a
beautiful silk scarf in his wallet, one of those worked by white hands
in the convents of the city. The son of the bell-ringer went with
him. They joined one of the insignificant bands who were devastating
Murcia, but they soon went on to Valencia and Catalonia, anxious to
perform greater exploits for the cause of God than merely stealing
mules and extorting contributions from the rich.
Gabriel felt an intense delight in this wandering life, with its
continual alarms owing to the proximity of the troops.
He had been made an officer at once, on account of his education, and
because of the letters of recommendation that certain of the prebends
of the Metropolitan Church had given him; letters lamenting greatly
that a youth of so much theological promise should go and risk his
life like a simple sacristan.
Luna enjoyed the free and lawless life of war with the zest of a
collegian out of bounds; but he could not hide the feeling of painful
disillusion that the sight of those armies of the Faith caused him.
He had expected to find something akin to the ancient crusading
expeditions: soldiers who fought for an ideal, who bent the knee
before beginning the fight, so that God might be on their side, and
who at night, after a hard-fought field, slept the pure sleep of an
ascetic; instead of which he found an armed mob, mutinous to their
leaders, incapable of that fanaticism which rushes blindfold to death,
anxious only that the war might last as long as possible, so that they
might continue the life of lawless wandering at the expense of the
country, which they considered the best life possible; people who
at the sight of wine, women or plunder would disband themselves,
hungering, turning against their leaders.
It was the ancient life of the horde, surging up through civilisation,
the atavic custom of stealing the stranger's bread and women by force
of arms, the ancient Celtiberic love of factions and internal strife,
that only caught hold of a political pretext in order to revive.
Gabriel, with very rare exceptions, found none in those badly-armed
and worse-clothed bands who fought with a fixed idea; they were
adventurers who wished for war for the sake of war; visionaries
anxious for fortune; country lads from the fields, who in their
passive ignorance had joined the factions, just as they would have
stayed at home if they had had better counsels; simple souls who
firmly believed that in the towns they were burning and destroying
God's ministers, and who had thrown themselves into the fray so that
society should not lapse into barbarism.
The common danger, the misery of the interminable marches to deceive
the enemy, the scarcity suffered in the barren fields and on the rough
hilltops on which they took refuge, made them all equals, enthusiasts,
sceptics or rustics. They all felt the same desire to compensate
themselves for their privations, to appease the ravenous beast they
felt inside, awakened and irritated by a life of such sudden changes;
as much by the wild abundance and plundering of a sack as by the
distress endured in the long marches over interminable plains without
ever seeing the slightest sign of life. On entering a town they would
shout, "Long live religion," but on the slightest provocation they
would do this, that and the other in the name of God and all the
saints, not omitting in their filthy oaths to swear by everything most
sacred in that same religion.
Gabriel, who soon became accustomed to this wandering life, ceased
to feel shocked. The former scruples of the seminarist vanished,
smothered under the crust of the fighting man, which became hardened
with war.
The romantic figure of Doña Blanca, the king's sister-in-law passed
before him, like a person in a novel; in her romantic energy this
princess wished to emulate the deeds of the heroines of La Vendeé, and
mounted on a small white horse, her pistol in her belt, and the white
scarf tied over her floating tresses, she put herself at the head of
these armed bands, who revived in the centre of the Peninsula
the strife of almost prehistoric times. The flutter of the dark
riding-habit of this heroine served as a standard to the battalions of
Zouaves, to the troop of French, German, and Italian adventurers, the
scum of all the wars on the globe, who found it pleasanter to follow
a woman anxious for fame than to enlist themselves into the foreign
legion of Algeria.
The assault of Cuenca, the sole victory of the campaign, made a deep
impression on Gabriel's memory; the troops of men wearing the scarf,
after they had knocked down the ramparts as weak as mud walls, rushed
like overflowing streams through the streets. The firing from the
windows could not stop them; they rushed in pale, with discoloured
lips and eyes brilliant with homicidal mania, the danger overcome, and
the knowledge that they were at length masters of the place drove them
mad; the doors of the houses fell under their blows, terrified men
rushed out to be pierced with bayonets in the streets, and in the
houses you could see women struggling in the arms of the assailants,
striking them in the face with one hand, while with the other they
struggled to retain their clothes.
Gabriel saw how the roughest of the mountaineers destroyed in the
Institute all the apparatus of the Cabinet of Physical Science,
breaking it in pieces. They were furious with these inventions of the
evil one, with which they thought the unbelievers communicated with
the Government of Madrid, and they smashed on the ground with the butt
ends of their muskets, and trampled with their feet, all the
gilt wheels of the apparatus, and all the discs and batteries of
electricity.
The seminarist was delighted at all this destruction; he also hated,
but it was with a calm, reflective hate bred in the seminary, all
positive and material sciences, for the sum total of his reasoning was
that they came perilously near to the negation of God; those sons of
the mountains in their blessed ignorance, had without knowing it done
a great deed. Ah! if only the whole nation would imitate them! In
former times there were none of these ridiculous inventions of
science, and Spain was far happier. To live a holy life, the learning
of the priests and the ignorance of the people was sufficient, for
both together produced a blessed tranquillity; what did they want
more? For so the country had existed for centuries, all through the
most glorious period of its existence.
The war came to an end, the closely pursued rebels passed through the
centre of Catalonia and were finally driven over the frontier, where
they were compelled to give up their arms to the French custom-house
officers. Many availed themselves of the amnesty, anxious to return to
their own homes. Mariano, the bell-ringer, was one of these. He did
not wish to live in a foreign land; besides, during his absence his
father had died, and it was extremely probable that he might succeed
to the charge of the Cathedral tower if he laid due stress on the
merits of his family, his three years' campaigning for the sake of
religion, and a wound he had received in his leg; he would really be
able to compare himself with the martyrs for Christianity.
Gabriel preferred emigration. "He was an officer and therefore
could not take the oath of allegiance to a usurping dynasty." This
declaration he made with all the pride learnt in this caricature of an
army, which emphasised all the ceremonies of ancient warfare, and who,
ragged and shoeless as they were, with their swords by their sides,
never failed to transmit orders to each other as "high-born officer."
But the real reason which prevented Luna from returning to Toledo was
that he wished to follow the course of events, to see new countries
and different customs. To return to the Cathedral would mean to remain
there for ever, to renounce everything in life, and he, who during the
war had tasted of worldly delights, had no desire to turn his back on
them quite so soon; also he was not yet of age, so he had plenty of
time before him in which to finish his studies; the priesthood was a
sure retreat, but one to which he was in no hurry to return just at
present; besides, his mother was dead, and his brother's letters told
him of no alteration in the sleepy life of the upper cloister, beyond
that the gardener was married and that the "Wooden Staff" was courting
a girl in the Claverias, it being against all the good traditions of
these people to ally themselves with anyone outside the Cathedral.
Luna lived for more than a year in the emigrants' cantonments; his
classical education and the sympathy aroused by his youth smoothed his
path to a certain extent; he talked Latin with the French abbés, who
were delighted to hear about the war from the young theologian, and
at the same time they taught him the language of the country. These
friends procured for him Spanish lessons among the upper middle
classes who were friendly to the Church. In these days of penury he
was saved by his friendship with an old legitimist Countess, who
invited him to spend several days in her country house, introducing
the warlike seminarist to all the grave and pious friends at her
assemblies as though he had been a crusader newly returned from
Palestine.
Gabriel's great desire was to go to Paris; his life in France had
radically changed his ideas, he really felt as though he had fallen
into a new planet. Accustomed to the monotonous life in the seminary,
and to the nomadic existence during that mountainous and inglorious
war, he was astonished at the material progress, the refinement of
civilisation, the culture and the well-being of the people in France.
He remembered now with shame his Spanish ignorance, all that Castilian
phantasmagoria, fed by lying literature, that had made him believe
that Spain was the first country in the world, and its people the
noblest and bravest, and that all the other nations were a sort of
wretched mob, created by God to be victims of heresy, and to receive
overwhelming punishment each time that they ventured to interfere with
this privileged country, which, though it eats little and drinks less,
has yet produced the holiest saints and the greatest captains of
Christendom.
When Gabriel could express himself fluently in French and had
contrived to save a few francs for his journey, he went to Paris. A
friendly abbé had procured him employment as corrector of proofs in a
religious library close to Saint Sulpice. In this priestly quarter of
Paris, with its hostels for the clergy and for religious families, as
gloomy as convents, with its shops full of pious images, which flood
the globe with varnished and smiling saints, was accomplished the
great transformation of Gabriel.
This quarter of Saint Sulpice with its streets almost Spanish in their
silence and peacefulness, with the sisters in black veils gliding by
the walls of the seminary, drawn by the sound of the bells, was for
the Spanish seminarist what the road to Damascus had been for the
Apostle. The French Catholicism, cultivated, reasoning and respectful
to human progress, bewildered Gabriel, whose fierce Spanish bigotry
had taught him to despise all profane science. There was only one true
learning in the world, and that was theology. The other sciences were
only toys, only fit to amuse the eternal infancy of humanity. To know
God and to meditate on the greatness of His power, this was the only
serious study to which men could devote themselves; machinery, the
discoveries of the positive sciences, in fact everything which did not
treat of divinity and the future life, was only a bagatelle for the
amusement of fools and people of no faith.
The former seminarist, who from his earliest childhood had despised
all human progress, was stupefied when he perceived how earnestly all
French Catholicism spoke of it. In correcting the proofs of so many
religious works he could not but notice the profound respect which
this despised science inspired in the good French priests, men of such
far superior culture to that of the canons down there. And moreover he
noticed a certain humble shrinking in the representatives of religion
when they came face to face with science--a desire to please, not
to be censorious, to help on with their sympathy any conciliatory
solutions, so that dogma should not fall to the ground, finding no
place in the rapid march of events that was hurrying humanity into
the future with the whirl of its new discoveries. Entire books were
written by eminent priests with the view of adjusting and bringing
into line the revelations of the holy books and the discoveries of
modern science, even at the risk of doing some violence to the former.
The ancient and venerable Church that Gabriel had seen in his own
country, immovable in its antiquated majesty, unwilling to move a
single fold of its mantle for fear of losing some of the dust of ages,
was stirring in France, endeavouring to renew itself, throwing on one
side the ancient garments of tradition, like old rags that would turn
it into ridicule, and stretching out its hands with almost despairing
strength to catch hold of the modern achievements of science; the
great enemy of yesterday, whose appearance had been ushered in with
bonfires and shameful abjurations was triumphant to-day.
What had that fatal apple of Paradise contained, that after six
thousand years of malediction that same Church had begun to venerate
it, striving to make it forget its ancient persecutions? Why was
religion, firm as a rock throughout the centuries, which had defied
persecutions, schisms and wars, beginning to dissolve before the
discoveries of a few men, and entering into that wild current which
sought for the cause and explanation of everything? If it had the
secular support of faith, why should it seek the assistance of reason
to maintain its traditions and to justify its dogmas?
Gabriel felt the same fever of curiosity which had obliged him as a
child to bend his back over the old volumes, bound in parchment, in
the library of the seminary; he wished to be acquainted with the
mysterious perfume of that hated science which had so disturbed God's
priests, and had made them indirectly deny the beliefs of nineteen
centuries. He wished to know why the sacred books were being
dislocated and tortured in order to explain by geological periods the
creation which God had accomplished in six days. What danger did they
hope to avoid by making the divinity appear before science in order to
explain its acts and fit them into the decisions of the latter?
Whence came the instinctive fear of the religious authors of roundly
affirming miracles? attempting instead to justify them by intricate
and tentative reasonings, without daring to adduce as the decisive
proof the incomprehensibility of supernatural prodigies.
For the time being Gabriel abandoned the tranquil atmosphere of the
religious library. His reputation as a humanist had reached the ears
of an editor living near the Sorbonne, so, without leaving the left
bank of the Seine, he moved into the Latin quarter to undertake the
correction of proofs in Latin and Greek. He earned in this way twelve
francs a day--far more than those canons of Toledo, who formerly had
appeared to him as great dukes. He lived in a small inn for students
near to the School of Medicine, and his vehement discussions at night
with his fellow-lodgers over the smoke of their pipes taught him as
much as the books of that hated science. Those students who lent him
books, or who told him of those he should search for in his free
hours in the library on the hill of Saint Genevieve, laughed like
pagans at the exalted ideas of the former seminarist.
For two years young Luna did little else but read; now and again he
accompanied his friends in some escapade, throwing himself into the
free and joyous life of the Quartier, wearing out the elbows of his
sleeves on the tables of the beershops. The Mimi of Murger often
passed before him, but less melancholy than the creation of the poet,
and the ex-seminarist found his Sunday evening idylls in the woods
surrounding Paris. But Gabriel was not of an amorous temperament;
curiosity and the thirst for knowledge mastered him, and after these
escapades from which he returned fresher, and with his brain keener,
he threw himself with greater ardour into his studies.
History, true history, whose cold clearness contrasted so strongly
with that intricate morass of miracles in the chronicles that he had
read in his childhood, beat down the greater part of his beliefs.
Catholicism was no longer for him the only religion, neither could
he any longer divide the history of humanity into two periods, that
before and that after the appearance in Judea of a handful of obscure
men, who, spreading themselves over the world, preached a cosmopolitan
morality drawn from the maxims of Orientals, and from the teachings of
Greek philosophy.
Religions were for him human inventions, subject to the conditions of
existence belonging to all organisms, its generous infancy capable of
blind sacrifices, its self-contained and masterful manhood, in which
the early sweetness was changed by the authoritative imposition of its
power, and its inevitable age, with a long agony, in which the sick
man, guessing his speedy end, clings to life with all the energy of
desperation.
His faith in Catholicism as the only religion disappeared completely;
losing his belief in dogmas he lost also, by inevitable logic, that
belief in the monarchy which had driven him to fight in the mountains,
and he understood clearly now the history of his country without
prejudices of race. The foreign historians showed him the sad fate of
Spain, arrested in the most critical period of her development, when
she was emerging young and strong during the most fertile period of
the Middle Ages, by the fanaticism of priests and inquisitors, and the
folly of some of her kings, who, with utterly inadequate means, wished
to revive the empire of the Caesars, draining the country for this mad
enterprise. Those people who had broken with the Papacy, turning their
backs for ever on Rome, were far happier and more prosperous than that
Spain, which slept like a beggar at the door of the Church.
At this period of his intellectual development Gabriel had an ideal,
and often of an evening he would leave his work to go and listen to
him for an hour at the College of France: this was Ernest Renan;
Gabriel admired him for a double reason, for his talent and for his
history. The great man had also passed through a seminary, and even
now had a priestly look as though he had suffered deeply from the
pressure of the ecclesiastical yoke; he was a rebel, and Gabriel felt
as though he belonged to his own family. "Truly the hammers to destroy
the temple are forged within the temple," and the law fatal to all
religions was being accomplished, when faith vanishes, and the
multitude no longer feel the fervour of early days.
Gabriel was astonished to hear how the teacher could penetrate the
intellectual development of the Hebrew people, which had served as the
basis of Christianity, as he heard him demolish bit by bit the
immense altarpiece, before which humanity had knelt for over nineteen
centuries. The Spanish seminarist revolted against his old faith with
all the impetuosity of his vehement temperament. How could he have
believed all that and have considered it the height of human wisdom!
Certainly Christianity had exercised a beneficial influence at one
period of the infancy of humanity, it had filled men's lives in the
Middle Ages when there was little to think of beyond religion, and, in
a land desolated by strife, there was no other refuge for intellectual
thought but the cathedral in the towns and the monastery in the
country. "The fairs--the assemblies for business and pleasure," said
the master, "were religious feasts; the scenic representations were
mysteries, the journeys were pilgrimages and the wars crusades." After
this the ways of life divided--religious life took one way and human
life the other. Art placed nature above the ideal, and men thought
more of earth than of heaven. Reason was born, and every advance that
it made was one step backward for faith, and at last the time arrived
when the clear-sighted, those who were anxious about the future, began
to ask themselves what the new belief was likely to be which would
replace the moribund religion. Luna had no doubts on the point--it was
science, and science alone, which could fill the vacuum caused by that
religion now dead for ever.
Influenced by the Hellenism of his master, which he assimilated
easily, being accustomed to daily intercourse with the Greek authors,
he dreamed that the humanity of the future would be an immense Athens,
an artistic and learned democracy governed by great thinkers, with
no strifes but those of the mind, with no ambition but that of
cultivating the intellect, of gentle manners, and devoted to the joys
of the mind and the culture of reason.
Of all his old beliefs, Gabriel only retained that of a creative
God from a certain superstitious scruple. His ideas were rather
disconcerted by astronomy, which he had taken up with an almost
childish eagerness, attracted by the charm of the marvellous.
That infinite space in which in olden days legions of angels had
manoeuvred, and which had served the Virgin as a pathway in her
terrestrial descents, he suddenly found to be peopled with thousands
of millions of worlds, and the more powerful men's instruments became
the more numerous they seemed to be, the distances being infinitely
prolonged to immensities that were inconceivable. Bodies were
attracted to one another travelling in space at the rate of millions
of miles a minute, and all this cloud of worlds revolved without ever
passing twice over the same spot in this immensity of silence, in
which fresh stars, and again others and others, were continually being
discovered as the instruments of observation became more perfect.
This God of Gabriel's having lost the corporeal form given to Him by
religion, and as divulged in the history of the creation, lost at once
all His attributes, and being magnified to fill the infinite and being
absorbed into it, became so impalpable and subtle to the intellect as
to appear a phantasm.
Nothing remained to Gabriel of all his ancient beliefs. His mind was
like a bare field over which the whirlwind had passed, for his last
belief, which had remained standing like a monolith in the midst of
ruins, the belief in the history of creation, had now fallen.
But it was impossible to the former seminarist to remain inactive with
his cargo of new ideas. He felt obliged to believe in something, to
devote to the defence of some ideal all the faith in his character, to
make some use of that fervour of proselytising which had been so
much admired in the class of eloquence in the seminary, and so
revolutionary sociology took possession of him. First of all it was
Proudhon with his audacious writings, and afterwards the work was
completed by some "militantes" who were working in the same printing
office as himself--old soldiers of the Commune, who had lately
returned from their exile in the prisons of Oceania, and were renewing
their campaign against social organisation with an ardour increased
tenfold by their painful sufferings and their desire of vengeance.
With them he went to the anarchist meetings; there he heard Reclus
and Prince Kropotkine, and the words of the since deceased Miquel
Bakronhine came to him as the gospel of a Saint Paul of the future.
Gabriel had met with his new religion, and he gave himself over to
it entirely, dreaming of the regeneration of humanity through its
stomach. Believing in a future life, misfortunes gave the false
consolation of happiness after death; but all religion was a lie,
there was no other life but that of the present, and Luna rose in
anger against the social injustice that condemned millions of beings
to poverty and misery for the happiness of a few privileged thousands.
Authority, which was the fount of all evil, was to him the greatest
enemy; it must be destroyed, but men must be created who were capable
of living without masters, priests or soldiers. The natural gentleness
of his character, and the horror of violence with which his three
years' campaigning had filled him, caused him rather to draw back from
his new companions, who, dreaming of hecatombs from dynamite and the
dagger to reform the world, obliged him to accept these new doctrines
through fear. No; he believed in the strength of the "idea," and in
the innocent evolution of humanity; he had only to work like the first
apostles of Christianity certain of the future, but without hurrying,
to see his ideas realised; he had only to fix his eyes on the day's
work, without thinking of the long years and centuries before it would
bear its fruit.
The ardour of his proselytising made him leave Paris at the end of
five years. He was anxious to see the world, to study for himself all
these social miseries, so as to judge what forces these disinherited
could command for their great transformation. Besides, he began to
find himself incommoded by the vigilance of the French police, on
account of his intimacy with the Russian students of the Quartier
Latin--young men with cold eyes and limp and dishevelled hair who were
endeavouring to implant in Paris the vengeances of Nihilism. In London
he came to know a young Englishwoman of weak health, but burning like
himself with all the ardour of revolutionary propaganda, who would
walk from morning till night in the lanes and surroundings of
workshops and laboratories, distributing pamphlets and printed
leaflets that she kept in a band-box that was always hanging on her
arm. In a short time Lucy became Gabriel's companion; they loved each
other without excitement, with a cold and quiet passion, more from
community of ideas than anything else, for the love of revolutionists,
dominated with the thought of rebellion against everything existing,
has not much room for any other feeling.
Luna and his companion went to Holland and thence to Belgium, settling
afterwards in Germany, always travelling from group to group of
"companions," taking up different work with that facility of
adaptation which seems universal among revolutionaries, who wander
over the world penniless, enduring every sort of privation, but
finding always in their difficulties some brotherly hand to raise them
and set them again on the path.
After eight years of this life Gabriel's friend died of consumption.
They were then in Italy, and Luna, finding himself alone, understood
for the first time how much support the gentle companion of his life
had given him. In his sorrow for the loss of Lucy he forgot for a
while his revolutionary enthusiasm, lamenting only the void left in
his life. He had not loved her as most men love, but she was his
companion, his sister, they were alike in their pleasures and their
sorrows, and their common poverty had welded them into one will.
Moreover, Gabriel felt himself aged before his time by this life
of soul-stirring adventures and painful privations. He had been
imprisoned in many places in Europe, being suspected of complicity
with the terrorists, he had often been beaten by the police, and he
began to find a difficulty in travelling about the Continent, as his
photograph figured with that of several other "companions" in the
central police offices of the principal nations. He was a vagabond and
dangerous dog, who would end by being kicked out of every place.
Gabriel could not live alone; he was accustomed to see those kind blue
eyes near him, and to hear the caressing voice with its bird-like
inflexions which had so much encouraged him in times of trial and
difficulty, and he could not endure the solitude in a strange land
after Lucy's death. A great longing for his native land awoke in him,
he wished to return to Spain, to that land he had so often ridiculed,
and which now in spite of its backwardness seemed to him so
attractive. He thought of his brothers, fixed like plants to the
stones of the Cathedral, never interesting themselves with what took
place in the world, never seeking for news of him, as though they had
entirely forgotten him.
With a sudden impulse, as though he were afraid of dying away from
his native land, he returned to Spain. In Barcelona some of the
"companions" had obtained for him the management of a printing press,
but before taking up his post he wished to spend a few days in Toledo.
He returned an old man, though he was barely forty, speaking four or
five languages, and poorer than when he had left it. He found that
his brother the gardener had died, and that the widow and her son had
taken refuge in a garret in the Claverias, where she supported herself
by washing the canon's linen. Esteban, the "Wooden Staff," received
him with the same admiration he had felt for him while in the
seminary. He talked a great deal about his travels, gathering together
all the people in the upper cloister, so that they should listen to
this man who had travelled all over the world, just as though he were
going about his own house. In their inquiries they painfully entangled
geography, as they could only comprehend two divisions in it, the
countries of heretics, and the countries of Christians.
Gabriel pitied the great poverty of these people, and admired the
humbleness of these Cathedral servants, content to live and die in the
same place, without any curiosity as to what was taking place outside
the walls. The church seemed to him a huge derelict. It was like the
petrified skeleton of one of those immense and powerful animals of
former days, that had been dead for ages, its body decayed, its soul
evaporated, and nothing left but this framework, like to the shells
found by geologists in prehistoric strata by whose structure they can
guess at the soft parts of the vanished being. Seeing the ceremonies
of worship which in former days had so moved him, he felt roused to
protest, a longing to shout to the priests and acolytes to stop, and
withdraw, as their times were passed, and faith was dead, and it was
only from routine and the fear of outside opinion that people now
frequented these places, which formerly religious fervour had filled
from morning till night.
On his arrival in Barcelona Gabriel's life was a whirlwind of
proselytising, of struggles, and of persecutions. The "companions"
respected him, seeing in him the friend of all the great propagandists
of "the idea," and one who might himself rank among the most famous
revolutionists. No meeting could be held without the "companion" Luna;
that natural eloquence which had caused such wonder on his entry into
the seminary, bubbled up and spread like an intoxicating gas in these
revolutionary assemblies, firing that ragged, hungry, and miserable
crowd, making them tremble with emotion at the description of future
societies set forth by the apostle, that celestial city of the
dreamers of all ages, without property, without vices, without
inequalities, where work would become a pleasure, and where there
would be no other worship but that of science and art. Some of his
hearers, the darker spirits, would smile with a compassionate gesture,
listening to his maledictions against authority, and his hymns to
the sweetness and triumph to be won by passive resistance. He was an
idealist, one to whom they must listen because he had served the cause
well; they who were the strong men, the fighters, knew well enough how
to crush in silence that cursed society if it should show itself deaf
to the voice of Truth.
When they exploded bombs in the streets the "companion" Luna was the
first to be surprised at the catastrophe, he was also the first to be
taken to prison on account of the popularity of his name. Oh! those
two years passed in the castle of Montjuich! They had ploughed a deep
furrow in Gabriel's memory, a deep wound that could not heal, that
made him tremble at the slightest remembrance, disturbing his calm,
and making him hot and cold with terror.
The madness of fear had taken possession of society, and all laws and
regard to humanity, were trampled under foot to defend it. The justice
of former ages, with its violent procedure was resuscitated in full
civilisation. The judge was distrusted as being too cultured and
scrupulous, and a free hand was given to the petty officers of
justice, ordering them to introduce afresh all the old instruments of
torture.
In the darkness of the night Gabriel saw his Moorish dungeon lighted
up; some men in uniform seized him and dragged him down the staircase
to a room where others were waiting with huge cudgels. A young man
with a soft voice, in the uniform of a lieutenant, and with the lazy
manners of a Creole, questioned him as to the various attempts that
had occurred months before down in the town. Gabriel knew nothing, had
seen nothing. But all the same these men were your companions; but
he, having fixed his eyes on high, contemplating his visions of the
future, had never realised that all around him this violence was
surging and germinating. His reiterated negative rendered the men
furious; the soft voice of the Creole became harsh with anger, and
with menaces and blasphemies they all threw themselves upon him, and
the cruel hunt of the man round and round the dungeon began, the
cudgels falling on his body, beat his head or his legs indifferently,
pursuing him into corners, following him as with a desperate bound he
reached the opposite wall, opening the way with his bent head, his
back resounding like an empty box beneath the blows. Now and then the
desperation of pain inflamed the victim, the lamb turned into a wild
beast, and before falling to the ground, cowering like a child before
superior numbers, he would throw himself on the executioners, tearing
them, and trying to bite them. Gabriel kept a button from the
lieutenant's uniform which had remained in his fingers after one of
these revolts of his weakness.
Afterwards, his tormentors, wearied by the inutility of their
violence, left him forgotten in the dungeon. A loaf of bread and some
bits of dry salt cod were his only food. Thirst, an infernal thirst,
racked his bowels, contracted his throat, and burnt his mouth. At
first he called piteously under the door for water, but afterwards he
would beg no more, knowing beforehand what the answer would be. It was
a calculated torture; they promised him as much water as he wished,
after he should have disclosed the names of the guilty, confessing
things of which he had no knowledge. Hunger strove in him against
thirst, but fearing this latter most, he would throw this salted food
into a corner as though it were poison. He was delirious with the
delirium of a shipwrecked man tormented with visions of fresh water
in the midst of the salt waves. In his nightmare he saw clear and
murmuring brooks, great rivers; and seeking freshness for his mouth
he would pass his tongue over the filthy walls, finding a certain
alleviation in the lime of the whitewash.
The privations and the incarceration disturbed his mind with horrible
ravings; often Gabriel was surprised at finding himself on all fours,
growling and barking opposite the door without knowing how or why.
His tormentors seemed to forget him; they had other prisoners to look
after. The jailors gave him water, but whole months passed without
anyone entering his cell. Some nights he would hear vaguely and
far off through the greasy walls wailing and sobs in the adjacent
dungeons. One morning he was awoke by sounds as of thunder, in spite
of a tiny ray of sunlight filtering through his loophole; hearing the
jailors in the corridors near, he understood the mystery. They had
been shooting some of the prisoners.
Luna received as a happiness this hope of death; he would renounce
with pleasure that shadow of a life in a small stone box, tormented by
physical pain and the fear of men's ferocity. His stomach, weakened by
all these privations, refused for many days, with horrible nausea, to
receive the bitter bread and the coppery mess. His want of exercise,
the want of air, and the bad and scanty nourishment had made him
fall into a mortal anaemia; he coughed continually, suffering great
oppression on his chest. The knowledge he had acquired of the human
body in his thirst for knowing everything did not admit of his being
mistaken; he would die as poor Lucy had died.
After a year and a half of imprisonment he appeared before a council
of war, mixed up with a mob of old men, women, and even quite young
people, all weakened and broken by imprisonment, with their skin white
and thick as chewed paper, and that dazed look in their eyes that
comes from solitary confinement. Gabriel hoped he would be executed.
When the fiscal came to the name of Luna on the long list he stopped
an instant, shooting a ferocious glance at him--this man was among the
theorists. It appeared from the declarations of witnesses that he took
no direct part in the deeds of violence, and that in his speeches he
had always deprecated them; still it must be remembered that he was
one of the principal propagandists of anarchism, and that he had
delivered speeches in all the workmen's societies frequented by the
authors of the attempts.
An elderly captain bent towards another member of the council,
speaking in his ear, but Gabriel caught his words:
"It is on these gentlemen who make speeches that we must lay our hand,
so that they may be warned not to lecture any more on Tolstoi or
Ibsen, or any of those foreign worthies who advocate throwing bombs."
Gabriel spent many months of solitary confinement in his prison.
From words now and then dropped by his jailors he could guess at the
fluctuations of his fate. Sometimes he would gather that he and all
his companions in misfortune were to be sent to the jail in Africa, or
again they would hint at his immediate liberation, or would prophesy
that they were all to be shot _en masse_. When at the end of two
years he left this gloomy castle, it was to be embarked with all his
companions for exile. He was only the shadow of a man; his weakness
made his walk as uncertain and tremulous as that of a child, but he
forgot his own misery in trying to assist those of his companions who
were even weaker than himself, and who bore the cruel scars of the
torments they had endured.
The return to liberty recalled all his former gentleness and the
philosophic pity with which he surrounded all men, pitying and
pardoning their faults. On landing in England the more violent of
his companions spoke of future vengeance on their persecutors, while
Gabriel asked pardon for them, as blind instruments employed by
society in a moment of terror, thinking they had saved it by their
barbarity.
The climate of London aggravated Gabriel's illness, and in about two
years he was obliged to move to the Continent, although England with
its absolute liberty was the only land where he could have lived
quietly and ignored.
His existence was a cruel one, always a fugitive through the different
countries of Europe, driven from one place to another by the vigilance
of the police, thrown into prison, or expelled on the slightest
suspicion. It was a return to the ancient persecution of the gipsies,
the constant hunting of independent people, leading vagabond lives, of
the Middle Ages. His illness and his desire for rest and peace made
him return to Spain. Time had produced a certain amount of tolerance
towards the exiles, and in Spain everything is soon forgotten, and
though the authorities are harder and less scrupulous than in other
countries, still they interfere less on account of their improvidence
and the carelessness natural to the race.
Sick and without any work by which he could earn his living, precluded
from seeking work among the printers, as his name was encircled by
a halo which terrified the masters, Gabriel fell into such extreme
poverty that the little help and succour his companions could afford
were unable to relieve it, and he travelled from end to end of the
Peninsula begging from his fellows and hiding from the police.
His spirit was broken, he was conquered, and he had no longer strength
to continue the struggle. Nothing remained for him but to die, but
merciful death came slowly to his call. He thought of his brother, the
only affection remaining to him in the world; he remembered the quiet
family in the Claverias, of which he had caught a glimpse on his last
visit to the Cathedral, and he turned to seek them as his last hope.
On his return to Toledo, he found the happy family dissolved;
misfortune had come even to that silent and stagnant corner.
But the Cathedral, insensible to all human vicissitudes was there,
the same as ever, and to it he clung, hiding himself in its recesses,
hoping to die there in peace, with no other hope but to be forgotten;
dying before his proper time, tasting the bitter happiness of
annihilation, leaving behind him at the door, like an animal who sheds
its skin, all that rebellion which had drawn upon him the hatred of
society.
His happiness was not to think, not to speak, to mould himself to that
dead world; he would be among the living statues peopling the upper
cloister, one more automaton; he would imitate those beings who seemed
to have absorbed into themselves something of the austerity of the
granite buttresses, he would inhale like a healing balsam the scent
of the rusty iron railings and the incense that spread through the
church, the ancient perfume of the past centuries.