Caesar or Nothing Part 7

The Cardinal was a man of exuberant pride, and he knew how to control himself. He felt a great fondness for Laura; but if there was anything more in this fondness than tranquil fatherly affection, if there was any pa.s.sion, only he knew it; the fire lurked very deep in his overshaded soul.

Laura made, socially speaking, a good marriage. She married the Marquis of Vaccarone, a babbling Neapolitan, insubstantial and light. In a short while, seeing that they were not congenial, she arranged for an amicable separation and the two lived independent.

III. CaeSAR MONCADA

AT THE ESCOLAPIANS

Caesar studied in Madrid in an Escolapian college in the Calle de Hortaleza, where he was an intern all the time he was taking his bachelor's degree.

His mother had gone to live in Valencia, after marrying Laura off, and Caesar pa.s.sed his vacations with her at a country-place in a neighbouring village.

Several times a year Caesar received letters and photographs from his sister, and one winter Laura came to Valencia. She retained a great fondness for Caesar; he was fond of her too, although he did not show it, because his character was little inclined to affectionate expansion.

At college Caesar showed himself to be a somewhat strange and absurd youth. As he was slight and of a sickly appearance, the teachers treated him with a certain consideration.

One day a teacher noticed that Caesar creaked when he moved, as if his clothes were starched.

"What are you wearing?" he asked him.

"Nothing."

"Nothing, indeed! Unb.u.t.ton your jacket."

Caesar turned very pale and did not unb.u.t.ton it; but the master, seizing him by a lapel, unb.u.t.toned his jacket and his waistcoat, and found that the student was covered with papers.

"What are these papers? For what purpose are you keeping them here?"

"He does it," one of his fellow students replied, laughing, "because he is afraid of catching cold and becoming consumptive." They all made comments on the boy's eccentricity, and a few days later, to show that he was not a coward, he tried to go out on the balcony on a cold winter night, with his chest bare.

Among his fellow-students Caesar had an intimate friend, Ignacio Alzugaray, to whom he confided and explained his prejudices and doubts.

Alzugaray was not a boarder, but a day-scholar.

Ignacio brought anti-clerical periodicals to school, which Caesar read with enthusiasm. His sojourn in a religious college was producing a frantic hatred for priests in young Moncada.

Caesar was remarkable for the rapidity of his decisions and the lack of vacillation in his opinions. He felt no timidity about either affirming or denying.

His convictions were absolute; when he believed in the exact truth of a thing, he did not vacillate, he did not go back and discuss it; but if his belief faltered, then he changed his opinion radically and went ahead stating the contrary of his previous statements, without recollecting his abandoned ideas.

His other fellow-students did not care about discussions with a lad who appeared to have a monopoly of the truth.

"Professor So-and-So is a beast; What-you-call-him is a talented chap; that fellow is a thick-witted chap. This kid is all right; that one is not."

In this rail-splitting manner did young Moncada announce his decisions, as if he held the secret explanation of all things tight between his fingers.

Alzugaray seldom shared his friend's opinions; but in spite of this divergence they understood each other very well.

Alzugaray came of a modest family; his mother, the widow of a government clerk, lived on her pension and on the income from some property they owned in the North.

Ignacio Alzugaray was very fond of his mother and his sister, and was always talking about them. Caesar alone would listen without being impatient to the meticulous narratives Ignacio told about the things that happened at home.

Alzugaray was of a very Catholic and very Carlist family; but like Caesar, he was beginning to protest against such ideas and to show himself Liberal, Republican, and even Anarchistic. Ignacio Alzugaray was a nephew of Carlos Yarza, the Spanish author, who lived in Paris, and who had taken part in the Commune and in the Insurrection of Cartagena.

Caesar, on hearing Alzugaray recount the doings of his uncle Carlos Yarza various times, said to his fellow-student:

"When I get out of this college, the first thing I am going to do is to go to Paris to talk with your uncle."

"What for?"

"I have to talk to him."

As a matter of fact, once his course was finished, Caesar left the college, took a third-cla.s.s ticket, went to Paris, and from there wrote to his mother informing her what he had done. Carlos Yarza, Alzugaray's uncle, received him very affectionately. He took him to dine and explained a good many things. Caesar asked the old man no end of questions and listened to him with real avidity.

Carlos Yarza was at that time an employee in a bank. At this epoch his forte was for questions of speculation. He had put his mind and his will to the study of these matters and had the glimmering of a system in things where everybody else saw only contingencies without any possible law.

Caesar accompanied Yarza to the Bourse and was amazed and stirred at seeing the enormous activity there.

Yarza cleared away the innumerable doubts that occurred to the boy.

In the short time Caesar spent in Paris he came to a most important conclusion, which was that in this life one had to fight terribly to get anywhere.

One day, on awakening in the shabby little room where he lodged, he found that the arms of a very smart woman were around his neck. It was Laura, very contented and joyful to surprise her madcap brother.

"Mamma is alarmed," Laura told him. "What are you doing here all this time? Are you in love?" "I? Bah!"

"Then what have you been doing?"

"I've been going to the Bourse."

SOUNDING-LINES IN LIFE

Laura burst out laughing, and she accompanied her brother back to Valencia. Caesar's mother wished the lad to take his law course there, but Caesar decided to do it in Madrid.

"A provincial capital is an insupportable place," he said.

Caesar went to Madrid and rented a study and a bed-room, cheap and unrestricted.

He boarded in one house and lodged at another. Thus he felt more free.

Caesar believed that it was not worth the trouble to study law seriously; and he imagined moreover that to study so many routine conceptions, which may be false, such as the conception of the soul, of equity, of responsibility, etc., would bring him to a shyster lawyer's vulgar and affected idea of life. To counteract this tendency he devoted himself to studying zoology at the University, and the next year he took a course in physiology at San Carlos.

At the same time he did not neglect the stock exchange; his great pride was to acquaint himself thoroughly with the details of the speculations made and to talk in the crowds.