LABOR AND A LANDSCAPE WITH FIGURES.
The smoke of the furnaces, which all night through were wide awake and
panting out their hot, hoarse breath, caught a silvery gleam as its
wreaths rolled into the distance; the faint smile of dawn fell upon the
remotest peaks of the mountains, and, by degrees, the hills that guard
Socartes came out of the darkness, the huge slopes of rust-colored
earth and the blackened buildings. The bell of the works rang out
shrilly its call “to work, to work,” and hundreds of sleepy souls came
out of the houses, huts, hovels, holes even. Doors creaked on their
hinges; the mules came reluctantly out of the stables, making their way
to their watering-place, and the whole establishment, which had just
now looked like a city of the dead lighted up by the infernal glare of
the furnaces, came to life and began to stir its thousand arms.
The steam soon was seething in the boilers of the great steam-engine,
which supplied the motive power both for the workshops and the
washing-mills. The water, which performed the principal part in the
operations, began to flow through the raised conduits from which it
fell on the cylinders. Files of men and women just risen from their
beds, made their way down to the scene of labor, and at length the
cylindrical sieves began to revolve with hideous groaning; the water
rushed from one to the other, pulverizing the dark earth which tumbled
on in muddy eddies and cataracts, from trough to trough, till it
settled at last in a fine chocolate-brown powder. The sound was as of
a thousand hungry jaws chewing grit and sand; the play of light on
water and soil made it as dazzling as a kaleidoscope, and the clatter
was like some enormous hollow drum, filled with pebbles and potsherds.
It was impossible to look on without turning giddy at the incessant
whirl of a vast skein, as it were, of threads of water, some clear and
transparent, others stained red by the ferruginous clay; nor could any
human brain that was not accustomed to the spectacle, picture to itself
this mad struggle of toothed wheels which never ceased biting at each
other, of cogs, that met, and caught, and rolled away again, of screws
which, as they turned, shrieked in pitiless clamor for oil.
The washing was all done in the open air. The connecting belts came
humming down from the machinery sheds; other belts began to revolve,
and at the same time a rhythmical stamping was heard, a slow and awful
tramp like a giant’s step, or a fearful throbbing inside mother earth.
This was the great hammer which had begun to beat; its stupendous blows
moulded the iron like a paste, and those huge wheels, and beams, which
look as if made to last forever, began to twist and writhe like the
limbs of men in torment, while the hammer, with its monotonous impact,
created new forms as strong as the rocks which are the work of ages.
For the results of labor have a strange resemblance to the results of
patience.
Men so black, that they look like hewn and animated coal, gathered
round the fiery objects that were taken from the forges, and seizing
them with those prolonged hands known as tongs, set to work to hammer
them. It is a strange kind of sculpture, this, which has fire for
its inspiring genius and a steam-hammer for its chisel. Wheels and
axle-trees for thousands of trucks, and the damaged portions of the
washing-machinery, were repaired here, and picks, spades and barrows
were made. At the back of the workshops saws hissed through blocks of
timber, and the iron, which had been formed for labor by fire of wood,
now cut through the sturdy fibre of trees hewn by the axe from their
native spot.
Meanwhile, the mules had been harnessed to long trains of trucks which
carried off the waste earth to add it to the slopes already made, or
fetched the mineral to be washed. They looked like immense reptiles,
crawling up and down to meet each other, and always passing close
but without any jar or collision. They crept into the mouths of the
tunnels, and their resemblance was really perfect to the wriggling
creatures that shelter in such damp clefts and caves; and when the
recalcitrant mules kicked and shied in the bowels of the earth, it was
easy to fancy the Saurians were fighting and screaming at each other.
In the deepest recesses of all, hundreds of men were tearing up the
earth with picks, inch by inch, to win the hidden treasure; these were
the sculptors of the strange and enormous figures which stood in awful
gravity and silence to confront the man who should venture to invade
their mysterious domain. The miners hewed down here, bored holes there,
dug farther on in one place, scraped down the wall in another, broke
up the limestone, chipped out the pretty flakes of mica and shale,
pounded down the calcareous clay, picked out the hematite and pyrites,
crushed the fine, white marble--rolling and stirring it incessantly
till it should yield zinc silicate--for zinc may be called the silver
of Europe, which, being a metal of which you cannot make saucepans,
is destined to become the fount of wealth and civilization. Is it not
on zinc that Belgium has hoisted her standard of moral and political
greatness? Aye, tin even has its epic!
The sky was clear and bright; the sun rose unclouded on the scene,
and the wide settlement of Socartes flashed from dark neutrality into
redness. The sculptured rocks, the heaps of ore, the hillocks of waste
soil that rose on every side like Babylonian mounds, were red; the
ground, the trucks and carts, the machinery, the water and the laborers
that gave life to Socartes. The brick-colored tone was universal, with
faint shades of difference in the earth and the houses, the metal and
the people’s garments. The women at work at the washing looked like a
crowd of nymphs, come down in the world, and cast in red ironstone.
A rivulet of crimson fluid ran through the bottom conduit to join a
crimson river--you might fancy it the sweat of these toiling men and
machines, of muscles and of iron.
Nela stepped out of the house. Even she, though she did not work in
the mines, was faintly tinged with the universal ruddle, for the
finely-powdered metal spared no one. In her hand she held a hunch of
bread which Señana had given her for breakfast, and as she ate it she
walked on quickly, lost in thought and not lingering to amuse herself.
She had soon passed the workshops and, going up the inclined plane and
the steps before mentioned, she reached the houses of Aldeacorba. The
first of these was a handsome and stately mansion, large, well-built,
and cheerful looking, but lately restored and painted; with stone
boundary walls, decorated eaves and a broad escutcheon surrounded
by granite foliage. And the escutcheon itself would be less missed
than the climbing vine, whose long and leafy branches looked like
whiskers--growing, as whiskers do, on each side of a face, of which
the two windows served as eyes, while the escutcheon was the nose and
the long balcony the mouth, always widely grinning. And to complete
this whimsical air of personality, a beam stuck out from the balcony
intended to attach a rope to support an awning, and with this addition
the face was seen as smoking a cigar. The roof was in the shape of a
cap and in it there was a window that might represent the tassel. The
chimneys could only be the ears. It was one of those faces in which a
physiognomist reads plainly, peace of mind, ease of circumstance and a
quiet conscience.
In front of it was a little court-yard enclosed by a wall of adobe,
and on one side was a pretty orchard. As Nela went in she met the cows
coming out to pasture, and after exchanging a few words with their
driver--a formidable youth, about four feet high and ten years old--she
went straight up to a stout gentleman, whiskered, grey-haired and
florid, with a kind face and pleasant smile, and a half-military and
half-rustic air; he was in his shirt sleeves and braces, and his hairy
arms were bared to the elbow. Before the little girl addressed him, he
looked up at the house and called out: “Here is Nela, my boy!”
A lad at once made his appearance, remarkably tall, grave and erect,
his head held somewhat stiffly and his eyes fixed and vacant like
lenses. His face was like marble, carved with exquisite sharpness, and
his skin was as fine and soft as a girl’s; there was not a feature or a
line which was not of that supremely beautiful type of manliness which
was the outcome of a thousand years of Hellenic thought. Those eyes
even, so purely sculpturesque in their lack of sight, were large, grand
and brilliant. Their fixity lost its strangeness when you remembered
that behind them all was night. In the absence of the faculty which is
the cause and origin of facial expression, this blind Antinous had the
cold serenity of marble, endowed with form by the genius of sculpture
and with life by a vital spark. A breath, a ray of warmth, a mere
sensation would suffice to animate the beautiful stone which, while it
possessed every charm of form, was devoid of that consciousness of its
own beauty, which is born of the faculty of seeing it.
He looked about twenty, and his strong and graceful frame was in
every respect worthy of the incomparable head that crowned it. Never
was a more lamentable injustice done by Nature, than to this perfect
example of humanity as to beauty, blest, on one hand, with every
gift, and bereft, on the other, of the sense by which man has most in
common with his fellow-man and gains familiarity with all the marvels
of creation at large. The injustice was such, that these splendid
gifts were useless--it was as though after creating all things the
Creator had left them in darkness, so that he could not himself take
pleasure in his works. And to make the privation more conspicuous, the
young man had mental lights of the highest order and a very superior
intelligence. To have this and to lack the faculty of conceiving the
idea of visibility, of form as distinct from mere matter, and at the
same time to be as beautiful as an angel; to have all the faculties of
a man and be as blind as a vegetable! It was strange and hard. We,
alas! know not the secret of these terrible injustices; if we did,
then indeed the gates would be open to us which hide the primordial
secrets of moral and physical duty; we should understand the fathomless
mysteries of inherited woe, of evil and of death, and might take
measure of the dark shadow which always haunts life and all that is
good in it.
Don Francisco Penáguilas, the young man’s father, was more than good,
he was admirable; judicious, kind, genial, honorable and magnanimous,
and well educated too. No one disliked him; he was the most respected
of all the rich land-owners in the country side, and more than one
delicate question had been settled by the mediation--always equitable
and intelligent--of the _Señor de Aldeacorba de Suso_. The house in
which we now find him had been the home of his infancy. In his youth
he had been to America, and on returning to Spain without having made
his fortune, he had joined the National Guard. He then returned to his
native town where, having inherited a good fortune, he devoted himself
to husbandry and to breeding cattle, and at the period of our story he
had just come into another and even larger sum.
His wife, who was an Andalusian, had died very young, leaving him
the one son who, from his birth, was found to be deprived of the most
precious of the five senses. This was the one drop which embittered
the tender father’s cup. What was the use of reminding him that he
was wealthy, that fortune favored all his undertakings and smiled on
his house? For whose sake did he care about it all? For one who could
see neither the thriving beasts, the flowery meadows, the overflowing
granaries, nor the orchard with its abundant crop. Don Francisco would
gladly have given his own eyes to his son, and have remained blind for
the rest of his days, if such an act of generosity were possible in
this work-a-day world; but, as it was not, Don Francisco could only
carry his devotion into practice by giving the hapless youth every
pleasure which could alleviate the gloom of the darkness in which
he lived. For him he was indefatigable in the cares and the endless
trifling details of forethought and affection of which mothers have the
secret--and fathers sometimes, when the mother is no more. He never
contradicted his son in anything which might console or entertain
him within the limits of propriety and morality. He amused him with
narratives and reading, watched him with studious anxiety, considering
his health, his legitimate amusements, his instruction and his
Christian education; for, said Señor de Penáguilas, whose principles
were strictly orthodox: “I would not have my son doubly blind.”
Now, as he came out of the house, he said affectionately:
“Do not go too far to-day, and do not run--good-bye.”
He watched them from the gate till they had turned the corner of the
garden wall, and then he went indoors, for he had many things to do; to
write to his brother Manuel, to buy a cow, to prune a tree, and to see
whether the guinea-hen had laid.