Their Son; The Necklace Part 1

Their Son; The Necklace.

by Eduardo Zamacois.

EDUARDO ZAMACOIS

_Artist--Apostle--Prophet_

Few writers of the tremendously virile and significant school of modern Spain summarize in their work so completely the tendencies of the _resurgimiento_ as does Eduardo Zamacois. "Renaissance" is really the watchword of his life and literary output. This man is a human dynamo, a revitalizing force in Spanish life and letters, an artist who is more than a mere artist; he is a man with a message, a philosophy and a vision; and all these he knows how to clothe in a forceful, masterly and compelling style, which, though not always lucid, always commands.

Zamacois _sees_ life, and paints it as it is, sometimes with humor, often with pitiless, dissecting accuracy.

To me, Zamacois seems a Spanish Guy de Maupa.s.sant. He tells a story in much the same way, with that grace and charm which only genius, coupled to infinite hard work, can crystallize on the printed page. His subjects are often much the same as those of de Maupa.s.sant. His sympathy for what prigs call "low life"; his understanding of the heart of the common people; his appreciation of the drama and pathos, the humor and tragedy of ordinary, everyday life; his frank handling of the really vital things--which we western-hemisphere hypocrites call improprieties and turn up our noses at, the while we secretly pry into them--all mark him as kin with the great French master. Kin, not imitator, Zamacois is Zamacois, no one else. His way of seeing, of expressing, is all his; and even the manner in which he handles the Castillian, constructing his own grammatical forms and words to suit himself, mark him a pioneer. He is a hard man to translate. Dictionaries are too narrow for the limits of his vocabulary. Many of his words baffle folk who speak Spanish as a birthright. He is a _jeune_ of the _jeunes_. A creative, not an imitative force. Power, thought, vitality, constructive ideals: these sketch the man's outlines. He comes of a distinguished family. The great Spanish painter, of his same name, is a close relative.

His personality is charming. My acquaintance with him forms one of the pleasantest chapters in a life of literary ups and downs. Ruddy, vigorous, with short hair getting a bit dusty; with a contagious laugh and a frequent smile; with a kind of gay worldliness that fascinates; a nonchalant, tolerant philosophy; a dry humor; a good touch at the piano; an excellent singing voice for the performance of _peteneras_ and folk-songs without number; a splendid platform-presence as a lecturer on Spanish literature and customs, Zamacois is an all-round man of intense vitality, deep originality and human breadth. He is a wise man, widely traveled, versed in much strange lore; and yet he has kept simplicity, courtesy, humanity. Spain is decadent? Not while it can produce men, thinkers, writers like this man--like this member of the new school that calls itself, because it realizes its own historic mission, _el resurgimiento_.

"Nothing binds nations together so securely," he said to me one day, "and nothing so profoundly vitalizes them, as literature and art.

Commercial rivalries lead to war. But artistic and literary matters are free and universal. Beauty cannot be appreciated, alone. It must be shared, to be enjoyed. My ambition--or one of my ambitions--is to bring the old world to the new, and to take back the new to the old." He spoke with enthusiasm, for he is an enthusiast by temperament, filled with nervous energy that looks out compellingly from his gray eyes--not at all a Spanish type, as we conceive the typical Spaniard. "I am sorry you Americans know so little of Spanish letters. You have always gone to France, rather than to Spain, for your literary loves. To you, as a race, the names of Galdos, Benavente, Emilia Pardo Bazan, Valle Inclan, Martinez Ruiz, Baroja, Trigo, Machado, the Quintero, Carrere, Marquina, Dicenta, Martinez Sierra and Linares Rivas are but names. The literary world still looks to France; but Spain is slowly coming into her own.

Her language and literature are spreading. Civilization is beginning to realize something of the tremendous fecundity and genius of the modern Spanish literary renaissance."

When I asked him about himself, he tried to evade me. The man is modest.

He prefers to talk about Spain. Only with difficulty can one make him reveal anything of his personality, his life.

"I have no biography," he laughed, when I insisted on knowing something of him. "Oh, yes, I was born, I suppose. We all are. My birth took place in Cuba, in 1878. When I was three, my parents took me to Brussels. I grew up there, and in Spain and Paris. My education--the beginning of it--was given me in Paris and at the University of Madrid. Degree?

Well--a '_Philosophe es Lettres_.' I much prefer the t.i.tle of Philosopher of Humanity." That, alone, shows the type of mind inherent in Zamacois.

His first novel was published when he was eighteen. He has since written about thirty more, together with thousands of newspaper articles in _El Liberal_, _El Imparcial_, and no end of others. He has produced ten plays, and many volumes of criticisms, chronicles and miscellanea, beside two volumes on the great war. His pen must have had few idle moments!

In addition to all this, he has edited several papers. At twenty-two he was editing _Germinal_. A Socialist? Yes. Once on a time more radical than now, when the more universal tendencies have entered in, he still believes in the principles of Socialism, as do so many of the "young,"

all over Europe.

He himself divides his work into three main epochs. The first has love for its keynote; and here we find _El Seductor_, _Sobre el Abismo_, _Punto-Negro_, _Loca de Amor_, _De Carne y Hueso_, _Duelo a Muerte_, _Impresiones de Arte_, _Incesto_, _La Enferma_, _De mi Vida_, _Amar a Obscuras_, _Bodas Tragicas_, _Noche de Bodas_, _El Lacayo_, and _Memorias de una Cortesana_. The second epoch deals with death and mysteries, the future life, religion. (Zamacois is religious in the sense that so much of the young blood of the Latin world is religious--negatively. They think more clearly than we Anglo-Saxons, in some way, these Latins!) _El Otro_, _El Misterio de un Hombre Pequenito_ and some others fall into this epoch. The third is characterized by a wider vision, a more complete realization of the essential tragedy and irony of human life, and is tempered by the understanding that comes to all of us when graying hair and fading illusions tell us we are no longer young. Here we find _Anos de Miseria y de Risa_, _La Opinion Ajena_ and stories of the type of those in the present volume. Surely _El Hijo_ and _El Collar_ are cynical enough to rank with masterpieces of cynicism in any tongue.

Zamacois' plays are distinguished by the same dramatic, often mystic, elements that make his novels and short stories of such vital interest.

The more important t.i.tles are: _Teatro Galante_, _Nochebuena_, _El Pasado Vuelve_, and _Frio_.

"Spain still dominates the whole of Spanish literature," says Zamacois.

"The Latin new world has had but slight influence thereon. And Spain is fast becoming liberalized. _Resurgimiento_ is the pa.s.s-word, all along the line. Even our women are becoming liberalized--or we are beginning to emanc.i.p.ate them, a little. That is highly revolutionary--for Spain!

The war has flooded Spain with new ideas, not only abstract but concrete. We are getting free speech and a free press--is America winning more lat.i.tude, or shrinking to less?--and we are enforcing education. We are reviving physically. Athletic sports are coming in.

These are all signs of the Renaissance, just as the new school of writers is a sign. I suppose most of the new blood is indifferent to religion. Spain has a small body of religionist fanatics, a strong minority of non-religious, intellectual elite, and a vast body of indifferent folk, slowly making progress toward enlightenment.

"Spain's misfortune is this--that you foreigners have seen in her only the picturesque, the medieval, the exotic. Spain has scientific, engineering and literary triumphs to be proud of now, as well as ivy-grown cathedrals, bull-rings and palaces. Under her old, hard carapace, new blood is leaping; it leaps from her strong heart, across half the world.

"Our real rebirth took place after the Spanish-American war, when our colonial system collapsed and we had to roll up our sleeves and support ourselves by hard work. Defeat was to us a blessing in disguise. Spain is to-day a much different and better land than it was twenty years ago.

For one thing, we use more soap, these days. As the church declines, bathtubs multiply. _Tendre que decir mas?_

"A new spirit and a new life are to-day stirring in ancient Iberia. A splendid artistic and literary renaissance, vast commercial undertakings and enormous manufacturing enterprises are all developing hand in hand.

Spain's past is glorious. Her future is both glorious and bright."

GEORGE ALLAN ENGLAND.

_12 Park Drive, Brookline, Ma.s.s._

THEIR SON

I

At about the age of thirty, tired of living all alone with no one to love, Amadeo Zureda got married. This Zureda was a stocky fellow, neither tall nor short, dark, thoughtful, and with a certain slow, sure way of moving. The whole essence of his face, the soul of it--to speak so--was rooted in the taciturn energy of the s.p.a.ce between his eyebrows.

There you found the man, more than in the rough black mustache which cut across his face; even more than in the thickness of his cheek-bones, the squareness of his jaws, the hard solidity of his nose. His brow was somber as an evil memory.

One after the other you might erase all the lines of that face, and so long as you left the thick-tufted brows, you would not have changed the expression of Amadeo Zureda. For there dwelt the whole spirit of the man, reserved yet ardent.

His marriage rescued Rafaela, whom he made his wife, from the slavish toil of a work-woman. Rafaela was just over eighteen, a buxom brunette with big, roguish, black eyes. Her breath was sweet, her lips vivid, her mobile hips full and inviting, like her b.r.e.a.s.t.s; and she had a free-and-easy, energetic, enterprising way of walking. Joined to a kind of untamed grace (just a bit vulgar, in the manner of a daughter of the people), she possessed a certain distinction both of face and manner, of moving, of showing likes and dislikes, that enhanced and exalted her beauty. Her hands were small and well cared for. She liked fine shoes and starched petticoats that frou-froued as she walked.

Her mind resembled her body. It was restless, lively and incapable of keeping the same point of view for very long. When she talked, those coquettish eyes of hers shone brighter than ever, with enjoyment. Her mouth was rather large; her teeth dazzling; and the light of laughter always shone there like an altar-lamp.

Amadeo worshiped her. When he came home at night from work, Rafaela ran to meet him with noisy jubilation and then cuddled herself caressingly on his knees, after he had sat down. All this filled Zureda with ineffable joy, so that he became quite speechless, in ecstasy. At such times even the thoughtful scar of the wrinkle between his brows grew less severe, in the calm gravity of his dark forehead.

The newly married couple took lodgings on the sixth floor of a house not far from the Estacion del Norte. The house was new, and their apartment was full of sun and cheer, with big, well-lighted rooms. They had a couple of balconies, too; and these the busy, artistic hands of Rafaela kept smothered in flowers.

Amadeo was a locomotive-engineer. The company liked him well and more than well. During the two years he had been on the Madrid-Bilbao run he had never been called in for reprimand. He was intelligent and a hard worker. Fifteen hours he could stand up to the job, and still see just as clearly as ever with those black, powerful eyes of his. In his corduroys, this muscular, dark-skinned, impa.s.sive man reminded you of a bronze.

He was devoted to his job. He had learned engineering in the States, which everybody knows is a master-country for railroading. His parents had both died when he was very young. He had dedicated the whole plenitude of his affections, his sap and vigor as a single man, to his work. Foot by foot he knew the right-of-way from Madrid to Bilbao in its most intimate details, so that he could have made that run blindfolded, just as safely as if he had been walking about his own house. There were clumps of trees, ravines, rivers, hills and farms that, to his eyes, had the decisive meaning of a watch or a map.

"At such-and-such a place," he would think, "I've got to jam the brakes on; there's a down-grade just beyond." Or else: "Here's the bridge. It must be so-and-so o'clock." His grip on such ideas of time and s.p.a.ce was always exactly right. He seemed infallible. Zureda knew that all these inanimate objects, scattered along the line, were so many faithful friends incapable of deceiving him.

He shared this fetichistic love of the landscape with the love inspired in him by his engines. Ordinarily he ran two: No. 187 and No. 1,082. He called the first "n.i.g.g.e.r," and the second "Sweetie." n.i.g.g.e.r was an intractable brute, ill-tempered and hard-bitted. When she tackled a hill she seemed to quiver with pain, and in her iron belly strange threatening shrieks resounded. She skidded downhill and was hard to get under control. You would have said some wayward spirit was thrashing about inside her, eternally rebelling against all government. She was logy, at times, and hated to start; but once you got her going you had a proper job to stop her. When she rushed in under the black arch of a tunnel, her whistle shrieked with ear-splitting alarum, like a man screeching.

"Sweetie" was a different sort, meek, obedient, strong and good-willed on an up-grade, cautious and full of reserve on a down, when the headlong flight of the train had to be checked.

Twice a week, each time that Amadeo started on a run, his wife always asked him:

"Which machine have you got, to-day?"

If it was "Sweetie," she had nothing to worry about.

"That's all right," she would say. "But the other one! I certainly am afraid of it. It's bad luck, sure!"

Zureda, however, liked to handle both of them. Sometimes he preferred one, sometimes the other, according to the state of his nerves. When his mood was cheerful, he liked "Sweetie" best, because there wasn't much work about running her. He preferred her, usually, on quiet days, when the sun was giving the earth a big, warm kiss. Zureda's fireman was a chap named Pedro; an Andalusian, full of spicy songs and tales. Amadeo rather liked to hear these, always keeping his eyes fixed on blue distances that seemed to smile at him. Out ahead, over the boiler, the rails stretched on and on, shining like silver in the sun. The warm air blew about Zureda, laden with sweet country smells. Under his feet the engineer felt the shuddering of "Sweetie," tame, laborious, neither bucking nor snorting; and at such times, both proud and caressing as if he loved her, he would murmur:

"Get along with you, my pretty lamb!"

At other times the engineer's full-blooded vigor suffered vague irritations and capricious rages, unwholesome disturbances of temper which made him unwilling to talk, and dug still deeper the grim line between his brows. Then it was that he preferred to take out "n.i.g.g.e.r."