After this evening Gabriel avoided the meetings in the cloister, so as to have no more discussions with Silver Stick.  He repented of his audacity, and when he was alone reflected on the danger to which he had exposed himself in expressing his views so freely.  He felt terrified at the possibility of being expelled from the Cathedral to roam the world afresh; he reproached himself, throwing in his own teeth his folly in hurling himself against the prejudices of the past.  What could he hope to effect by changing the thoughts of these poor people?  What weight could the conversion of these few men, stuck like limpets to the stones of the past, have in the emancipation of humanity?

The Cathedral was to Gabriel like a gigantic tumour, which blistered the Spanish epidermis, like scars of its ancient infirmities.  It was not a muscle capable of development, but an abscess which bided its time either to be extirpated, or to disappear of itself through the working of the germs it contained; he had chosen this ruin as his refuge and he ought to be silent, to be prudent so that his ingratitude should not be flung in his face.

Moreover, his brother Esteban, breaking the cold reserve into which he had retired since the arrival of his daughter, counselled prudence.

“His mind seems possessed by the demon, Esteban,” said the priest, “and he explains his views with the most perfect calmness in this holy house, as though he were in one of those infernal clubs which exist in foreign countries.  Where on earth has your brother been to learn such things?  Never have I heard such frightful hérésies.  Tell him that I shall forget it all as I have known him since his childhood, and that I remember he was the pride of our seminary, but more especially because he is ill, and it would be inhuman to drive him out of the Cathedral; but he must not repeat this scandal.  Silence!  Let him keep all those atrocities in his own head, if it so pleases him to lose his soul; but in this holy house, and especially before its staff, not a word.  Do you understand? not a word.  The next thing will be that he will hold meetings in the Holy Metropolitan Church.  Besides, your brother must remember that, after all, at this moment, he is eating the bread of the Church, as he lives on you, and is supported by you, and it is not right to speak in this way of the most excellent work of God, and try to point out all its defects.”

This last consideration weighed the most with Gabriel, and it wounded his dignity.  Don Antolin said rightly, he was no more than a parasite of the Cathedral, and having taken refuge in her lap, he owed her gratitude and silence.  He would keep silence.  Had he not decided when he took refuge there to live as one dead?  He would live like an animated corpse, which in some religious orders is the supreme of human perfection.  He would think like everyone else, or rather, he would try not to think at all, but would simply vegetate there till his last hour came, like the plants in the garden or the fungus on the buttresses of the cloister.

The Cathedral servants seated themselves round the sewing machine, hoping in vain that their master would come down, but content on the whole, though they did not see him, to be near him, to look at his empty seat, and to talk to the girl who expressed such ingenuous admiration for her uncle’s conversation.  The Chapel-master was delighted that Luna, his sole admirer, had returned to visit him; during his temporary eclipse the poor musician had suffered all the bitterness of solitude, despairing with almost infantile rage, as though an immense audience had turned its back on him.  He caressed Gabriel as though he was the woman he loved, listening to his coughing, and recommending all sorts of fantastic remedies imagined by himself, uneasy at the progress of his malady and trembling at the idea that death might tear from him his only listener.

He told Gabriel of all the music he had studied during his absence.  When the sick man coughed much, he would cease playing his harmonium, and begin long talks with his friend, always on the subject of his constant preoccupation, musical art.

“Gabriel,” said the musician one evening; “you who are so keen an observer, and who knows so much, has it ever struck you that Spain is sad, and has not the sweet sentimentality of true poetry?  She is not melancholy, she is sad, with a wild and savage silence.  She either laughs in wild peals, or weeps moaning.  She has not the gentle smile, the joyful brightness that distinguishes the man from the animal.  If she laughs it is showing all her teeth; her inner meaning is always gloomy, with the obscurity of a cavern in which all passions rage like wild beasts seeking for an outlet.”

“You say truly, Spain is sad,” replied Luna.  “She does not now go dressed in black, with the rosary hanging to the pommel of her sword as in former years.  Still in her heart she is always dressed in mourning and her soul is gloomy and wild.  For three hundred years the poor thing has endured the inquisitorial anguish of burning or being burnt, and she still feels the spasm of that life of terror.  There is no joy here.”

“There certainly is not, and you find this more in music than in any other phase of Spanish life.  The Germans dance the gay and voluptuous waltz with a ‘bock’ in their hand, singing the Gaudeamus igitur, that students’ hymn glorifying the material life free from care.  The French sing amid rippling laughter, and dance with their free and elastic limbs, greeting with rapturous applause their fantastic and monkey-like movements.  The English have turned their dance into gymnastics, with the energy of a healthy body delighting in its own strength.  But all these people, when they feel the sweet sadness of poetry, sing Lieds, romances, ballads, something soft and flowing, that rests the soul and speaks to the imagination.  Here even the popular dances have much that is priestly, recalling the priestly stiffness of the sacred dances, and the circling frenzy of the priestess, who ended by falling in front of the altar with foaming mouth and bloodshot eyes.  And our songs?  They are most beautiful, the products of many civilisations, but most sad, despairing, gloomy, revealing the soul of a sick and tainted people, who find their greatest pleasure in human bloodshed, or urging on dying horses in the enclosure of a circus.  Spanish joy!  Andalusian merriment!  I cannot help laughing at it.  One night in Madrid I assisted at an Andalusian fête, all that was most typical, most Spanish.  We went to enjoy ourselves immensely.  Wine and more wine!  And accordingly the bottle went round, with ever frowning brows, gloomy faces, abrupt gestures.  ‘Olé! come along here!  This is the joy of the world!’ but the joy did not appear in any part.  The men looked at one another with scowling brows, the women stamped their feet and clapped their hands with a stupid vacuity in their looks, as though the music had emptied their brains.  The dancers swayed like erect serpents, with their mouths open, their looks hard, grave, proud, unapproachable, like dancers who were performing a sacred rite.  Now and then above the monotonous and sleepy rhythm, a song, harsh and strident like a roar, like the scream of one who falls with his body run through.  And the poetry?  As dreary as a dungeon, sometimes very beautiful, but beautiful as might be the song of a prisoner behind his bars, dagger thrusts to the faithless wife, offences against the mother washed out in blood, complaints against the judge who sends to prison the caballeros of the broad-brimmed sombreros and sashes.  The adieus of the culprit who watches in the chapel the light of his last morning dawn.  A poetry of death and the scaffold that wrings the heart and robs it of all happiness; even the songs to the beauty of women contain blood and threats.  And this is the music that delights the people in their hours of relaxation and that will go on ‘enlivening’ them probably for centuries.  We are a gloomy people, Gabriel, we have it in our very marrow, we do not know how to sing unless we are threatening or weeping, and that song is the most beautiful which contains most sighs, most painful groans and gasps of agony.”

“It is true, the Spanish people must necessarily be so.  It believes with its eyes shut in its kings and priests as the representatives of God, and it moulds itself in their image and likeness.  Its merriment is that of the friars ­a coarse merriment of dirty jests, of greasy words and hoarse laughs.  Our spicy novels are stories of the refectory composed in the hours of digestion, with the garments loosened, the hands crossed on the paunch, and the triple chin resting on the scapulary.  Their laughter arises always from the same sources ­grotesque poverty, the troublesome hangers on, the tricks of hunger to rob a companion of his provision of begged scraps.  The tricks to filch purses from the gaily-dressed ladies who flaunt in the churches, who serve as models to our poets of the golden age to depict a lying world devoid of honour.  The woman enslaved behind iron bars and shutters, more dishonest and vicious than the modern woman with all her liberty.  The Spanish sadness is the work of her kings, of those gloomy invalids who dreamt of conquering the whole world while their own people were dying of hunger.  When they saw that their deeds did not correspond to their hopes, they became hypochondriacs and despairingly fanatical, believing their ruin to be a punishment from God, giving themselves over to a cruel devotion in order to appease the divinity.  When Philip II. heard of the wreck of the Invincible, the death of so many thousand men, and the sorrow of half Spain, he never even winked an eyelid.  ’I sent it to fight with men, not with the elements,’ and he went on with his prayers in the Escorial.  The imperturbable gloom and ferocity of the kings re-acted on the nation, and this is why for many centuries black was the favourite colour at the court of Spain.  The sombre groves in the royal palaces, with their gloomy winter foliage, were and still are their favourite resorts; the roofs of their country palaces are black, with towers surmounted by weather-cocks, and dark cloisters like monasteries.”

Shut into that small room with no other listener than the Chapel-master, Gabriel forgot the discretion he had imposed on himself with a view to the continuance of his quiet existence in the Cathedral.  He could speak without fear in the presence of the musician, and he spoke warmly about the Spanish kings and of the gloom that from them had filtered through the country.

Melancholy was the punishment imposed by Nature on the despots of the Western decadence.  When a king had any artistic predispositions, like Fernando VI., instead of tasting the joy of life he nearly died of weariness listening to the airs on the guitar feebly tinkled by Farinelli.  As they were born with their minds closed to every inspiration of beauty or poetry, they spent their lives gun in hand in the woods near Madrid, shooting the deer and yawning with disgust at the fatigues of the chase, while the queens amused themselves at a distance hanging on to the arm of one of the bodyguard.  They could not live with impunity for three centuries in close contact with the Inquisition, exercising power simply as papal delegates, under the direction of bishops, Jesuits, confessors, and monastic orders, who only left to the Spanish monarchy the appearance of power, turning it, in fact, into an oppressed theocratic republic.  The gloom of Catholicism penetrated into their very bones, and while the fountains of Versailles were playing among their marble nymphs, and the courtiers of Louis XIV. were decked like butterflies in their multi-coloured garments, as shameless as pagans among the beautiful goddesses, the court of Spain, dressed in black, with a rosary hanging at its girdle, assisted at the burnings and, girt with the green scarf of the holy office, honoured itself by undertaking the duties of alguacil at the bonfires of heretics.  While humanity, warmed by the soft breath of the Renaissance, was admiring the Apollos and adoring the Venus’ discovered by the plough amid the ruins of mediaeval catastrophes, the type of supreme beauty for the Spanish monarchy was the criminal of Judea.  The black and dusty Christs in the old cathedrals, with the livid mouth, the skeleton and distorted body, the feet bony, and dripping with blood, much blood, ­that liquid so loved by the religious when doubt begins and faith weakens, and to impose dogma they place their hand on the sword.

“For this reason the Spanish monarchy has been steeped in gloom, transmitting its melancholy from one generation to another.  If by any chance there appeared among them anyone happy and pleased with life, it was because in the blue blood of the maternal veins there was a plebeian drop, which pierced like the rays of the sun into a sick room.”

Don Luis listened to Gabriel, receiving his words with affirmative gestures.

“Yes, we are a people governed by gloom,” said the musician.  “The sombre humour of those dark centuries lives in us still.  I have often thought how difficult life must have been to an awakened spirit.  The Inquisition listening to every word, and endeavouring to guess every thought.  The conquest of heaven the sole ideal of life!  And that conquest becoming daily more difficult!  Money must be paid to the Church to save one’s self, and poverty was the most perfect state; and again, besides the sacrifice of all comfort, prayers at all hours, the daily visits to the church, the life of confraternities, the disciplines in the vaults of the parish church, the voice of the brother of Mortal Sin interrupting sleep to remind one of the approach of Death; and added to this fanatical and weary life the uncertainty of salvation, the threat of falling into hell for the slightest fault, and the impossibility of ever thoroughly appeasing a sullen and revengeful God.  And then again, the more tangible menace, the terror of the bonfire, engendering cowardice and debasing suspected men.”

“In this way we can understand,” said Gabriel, “the cynical confession of the Canon Llorente explaining why he became secretary to the Holy Office:  ’They began to roast, and in order not to be roasted I took on me the part of roaster.’  For intelligent men there was nothing else to be done.  How could they resist and rebel?  The king, master of all lives and property, was only the servant of bishops, friars, and familiars.  The kings of Spain, except the first Bourbons, were nothing but servants of the Church; in no country has been seen as palpably as in this one the solidarity between Church and State.  Religion succeeded in living without the kings, but the kings could not exist without religion.  The fortunate warrior, the conqueror who founded a throne, had no need of a priest.  The fame of his exploits and his sword were enough for him, but as death drew near he thought of his heirs, who would be unable to dispose of glory and fear to make themselves respected as he had done, and he drew near to the priest, taking God as a mysterious ally who would watch over the preservation of the throne.  The founder of a dynasty reigned ’by the grace of strength’ but his descendants reigned ‘by the grace of God.’  The king and the Church were everything for the Spanish people.  Faith had made them slaves by a moral chain that no revolutions could break; its logic was indisputable ­the belief in a personal God, who busied Himself with the most minute concerns of the world, and granted His grace to the king that he might reign, obliged them to obey under pain of going to hell.  Those who were rich and well placed in the world grew fat, praising the Lord who created kings to save men the trouble of governing themselves; those who suffered consoled themselves by thinking that this life was but a passing trial, after which they would be sure to gain a little niche in heaven.  Religion is the best of all auxiliaries to the kings; if it had not existed before the monarchs these last would have invented it.  The proof is that in these times of doubt they are firmly anchored to Catholicism, which is the strongest prop of the throne.  Logically the kings ought to say, ’I am king because I have the power, because I am supported by the army.’  But no, senor, they prefer to continue the old farce and say, ’I, the king, by the grace of God.’  The little tyrant cannot leave the lap of the greater despot; it is impossible to them to maintain themselves by themselves.”

Gabriel was silent for some time; he was suffocating, his chest was heaving with the spasms of his hollow cough.  The Chapel-master drew near alarmed.

“Do not be uneasy,” said Luna, recovering himself; “it is so every day.  I am ill and I ought not to talk so much, but these things excite me, and I feel irritated by the absurdities of the monarchy and religion, not only in this country, but all over the world.  But, notwithstanding, I have felt real pity, profound commiseration for a being with royal blood.  Can you believe it?  I saw him quite close in one of my journeys through Europe.  I do not know how the police who guarded his carriage did not drive me away, fearing a possible attempt, but what I felt was compassion for the kings who have come so late into a world that no longer believes in the divine right; and these last twigs, sprouting from the worm-eaten and rotten trunk of a dynasty, carry in their poor sap the decay of the rotten branches.  It was a youth, as sick as I am, not by the chances of life, but weakly from his cradle, condemned before his birth to suffer from the malady that came to him with his life.  Just imagine, Don Luis, if at this time for the preservation of my own interests I begot a son, would it not be a coldly premeditated attempt against the future?”

And the revolutionist described the young invalid:  his thin body, artificially strengthened by hygiene and gymnastics, his eyes heavy and sunk deep in their sockets, the lower jaw hanging loose like that of a corpse, wanting the strength that keeps it fixed to the skull.

“Poor youth!  Why was he born?  What would be accomplished in his journey through the world?  Why had Nature, who so often refuses fecundity to the strong, shown herself prodigal to the loveless union of a dying consumptive?  What was the use to him of having carriages and horses, liveried servants to salute him, and ninnies to give him food; it would have been far better had he never appeared in the world but had remained in the limbo of those who are never born.  Like the squire of Don Quixote, who finding himself at last in the plenty of Barataria, had by his side a doctor Recio to restrain his appetite, this poor creature could never enjoy with freedom the pleasures of the remains of life left to him.”

“They pay him thousands of duros,” added Gabriel, “for every minute of his life, but no amount of gold can procure him a drop of fresh blood to cure the hereditary poison in his veins.  He is surrounded by beautiful women, but if he feels arising the happy tremors of youth, the sap of the spring of life, the predisposition of a family who have only been notable for the victories won in love’s battles, he must remain cold and austere, under his mother’s vigilant eye, who knows that carnal passion would rapidly end a life so weak and uncertain.  And the end of all these sad-and painful privations ­inevitable death.  Why was this poor creature born?  Often the greatness of the earth is worse than a malediction, and reasons of State are the most cruel of all torments for an invalid, obliging him to feign a health he does not feel.  To speak of the illness of the king is a crime, and the courtiers living under the shadow of the throne consider the slightest allusion to the king’s health as a sacrilege, a crime worthy of punishment, as though he were not a human being subject like others to death.”

“I do not care much for politics,” said the Chapel-master; “kings and republics are all the same to me, I am a votary of art.  I do not know what monarchy may be in the other countries that you have seen, but in Spain it seems quite played out.  It is tolerated like so many relics of the past, but it inspires no enthusiasm and no one is inclined to sacrifice themselves for it, and I believe that even the people who live in its shadow, and whose interests are most bound up with those of the crown, have more devotion on their tongues than in their hearts.”

“It is so, Don Luis,” said Gabriel; “for nearly a century the monarchy has been dead in Spain; the last loved and popular king was Fernando VII.  Since then the nation has asserted itself, becoming emancipated from the old traditions, but the kings have not progressed; on the contrary, they have gone back, withdrawing themselves daily more and more from the anticlerical and reforming tendencies of the first Bourbons.  If in educating a prince nowadays his masters were to say, ‘We will try and make a Carlos III. of him,’ even the stones of the palace would be scandalised.  The Austrians have revived like those parasitic plants which, having been torn up, reappear after a little while.  If in the life of the kings they seek for examples in the past, they remember the Austrian Caesars, but it is complete oblivion of those first Bourbons who morally killed the Inquisition, expelled the Jesuits, and fostered the material progress of the country; they renounce the memory of those foreign ministers who came to civilise Spain.  Jesuits, friars and clerics order and direct as in the best times of Charles II.  To have had as minister a Count of Aranda, the friend of Voltaire, is a shame of the past and to be passed over in silence.  Yes, Don Luis, you say well, the monarchy is dead.  Between it and the country there is the same relation as between a corpse and a living man.  The secular laziness, the resistance to all change, and the fear of the unknown that all stationary people feel, are the causes of the continuance of this institution, that has not like other countries the military outlet or the aggrandisement of its territory as a justification of its existence.”

With this the conversation ended that evening in the Chapel-master’s little room.

Gabriel found himself drawn afresh by the affection of his admirers in the Claverías.  They coaxed him and followed him, lamenting his absence.  They could not live without him, so declared the shoemaker.  They had become accustomed to listen to him, they felt the desire of being enlightened, and they begged the master not to desert them.

“We meet in the tower now,” said the bell-ringer; “Silver Stick looks on our meetings with an evil eye, and he has gone so far as to threaten the shoemaker to turn him out of the Claverías if the meetings continue to be held in his house.  He will not interfere with me; he knows my character.  Besides, if he rules in the upper cloister, I rule in my tower.  I am quite capable, if he comes to disturb us with his spying, of throwing him down the stairs, the miserly devil!”

And he added with an affectionate expression, a great contrast to his usual rough and taciturn character: 

“Come, Gabriel, we expect you in my house.  When you are tired of keeping your niece and that crazy Don Luis company, come up for a little while.  We cannot get on without your words.  Don Martin has been quite enthusiastic since he heard you the other evening; he wants to see you; he says he would go from one end of Toledo to the other to hear you.  He wishes me to let him know if you decide on rejoining your friends, because Don Antolin in speaking to him sets you down as a madman and a heretic who does not know what to be after.  But he is an ignoramus who, after studying for his profession, can do no better than sell tickets and squeeze the poor.”

Luna returned to the meetings in the bell-ringer’s house.  The greater part of the morning he sat by his niece, soothed by the tic-tac of the machine, which caused a gentle drowsiness, watching the cloth pass under the presser with little jumps, spreading the peculiar chemical scent of new stuffs.

He watched Sagrario always sad, devoting herself to her work with taciturn tenacity; when now and then she raised her head to regulate her cotton and met Gabriel’s glance, a faint smile would pass over her face.

In the isolation in which the anger of her father had left them they felt obliged to draw together as though a common danger threatened them, and their bodily infirmities were a further bond of union.  Gabriel pitied the fate of the poor young woman, seeing how hardly the world had treated her after her flight from the family hearth.  Her long illness had changed her greatly and still caused her pain, her once beautiful teeth were no longer white and regular, and the lips were pallid and drawn; her hair had grown thin in places, but she contrived to conceal this with locks of the auburn hair, remains of her former beauty, which she dressed with great skill; but in spite of this her youth was beginning to assert itself, giving light to her eyes and charm to her smile.

Many nights Gabriel, tossing on his bed unable to sleep, coughing, and with his head and chest bathed in cold sweat, would hear in the room adjoining the suppressed moans of his niece, timid and smothered so that the rest of the household should not be disturbed.

“What was the matter with you last night?” asked Gabriel the following morning.  “What were you moaning for?”

And Sagrario, after many denials, finally admitted her discomfort: 

“My bones ache; directly I get to bed the pain begins and I feel as though my limbs were being torn asunder.  And you, how are you?  All night I heard you cough, and I thought you were suffocating.”

And the two invalids stricken by life forgot their own aches and pains to sympathise with those of the other, establishing between their hearts a current of loving pity, attracted to each other not by the difference of sex, but by the fraternal sympathy aroused by each other’s misfortunes.

Very often Sagrario would try to send her uncle away; it pained her to see him sitting close by her, doing nothing, coughing painfully, fixing his eyes upon her as though she were an object of adoration.

“Get up from here,” the girl would say gaily ­“it makes me nervous seeing you so very quiet keeping me company when what you want is life and movement.  Go to your friends; they are expecting you in the bell-ringer’s tower.  They have been talking about me, thinking it is I who keep you in the house.  Go out to walk, uncle!  Go and speak of those things that stir you so much, and that those poor people listen to open-mouthed.  Be careful as you go up the stairs; go slowly and stop often, so that the demon of the cough, may not get hold of you.”

Gabriel spent the later hours of the morning in the bell-ringer’s “habitación.”  The walls of ancient whitewash were adorned by faded and yellow engravings, representing episodes in the Carlist war, remembrances of the mountain campaign which for long years had been the pride of Mariano, but of which now he never spoke.

Here Gabriel met all his admirers.  Even the shoemaker worked at night in order not to deprive himself of this meeting.  Don Martin, the curate, also came up, concealing himself carefully so that Silver Stick should not see him.  It was a small community grouping itself round the sick apostle, with all the zeal inspired by the unknown.

Gabriel answered all these men’s questions, that so often betrayed the simplicity of their minds.  When a fit of coughing seized him, they all surrounded him with concern written on their faces.  They would have wished even at the cost of their own lives to restore him to health.  Luna, carried away by his enthusiasm, ended by narrating to them the story of his life and sufferings, and so the prestige of martyrdom came to increase the ardour of these people.  The narrowed minds of these sedentary men, living tranquil and safe in the Cathedral, made them admire the adventures and torments of this fighter; for them he was a martyr to this new religion of the humble and oppressed, and besides, their innocence converted him into a victim of that social injustice which they daily hated more.

For them there was no other truth but Gabriel’s words; the bell-ringer, although the roughest and most silent among them, was the most advanced in his conversion.  His admiration for Gabriel which dated from their childhood, his dog-like fidelity, carried him on with leaps and bounds, making him accept at once even the most distant ideals.

“I am whatever you are, Gabriel,” he said firmly.  “Are you not an anarchist?  I will be one also ­indeed, I think I have always been one.  Do you not preach that the poor should live and the rich should work; that everyone should possess what he earns, and that we should all help one another?  Well, this is just what I thought when we wandered over the country with our guns and our scarf.  And as far as religion is concerned, which formerly nearly drove us mad, I feel perfectly indifferent.  I am convinced on hearing you that it is a sort of fable invented by clever people in order that we, the poor and unfortunate, should submit to the miseries of this world hoping for heaven; it is not badly imagined, for in the end those who die and do not find heaven will not return to complain.”

One day Gabriel wished to go up where the bells were hung.  It was now well on in spring; it was warm, and the intense blue of the sky seemed to attract him.

“I have not seen the ‘big bell’ since I was a child,” he said.  “Let us go up; I should like to see Toledo for the last time.”

And accompanied by his admirers, indeed, almost carried by them, he went slowly up the narrow spiral staircase.  Arrived at the top, the soft wind was murmuring through the great iron railings, the cages of the bells.  From the centre of the vault hung the famous “Gorda,” an immense bronze bell, with all one side split by a large crack; the clapper, which was the author of the mischief, lay below it, engraved and as thick as a column, and a smaller one now occupied the cavity.  The roofs of the Cathedral, dark and ugly, lay at their feet, and in front on a hill rose the Alcazar, higher and larger than the church, as though keeping up the spirit of the emperor who built it, Cæsar of Catholicism, champion of the faith, but who nevertheless strove to keep the Church at his feet.

The city spread out around the Cathedral, the houses disappearing in the crowd of towers, cupolas and absides.  It was impossible to look on any side without meeting with chapels, churches, convents and ancient hospitals.  Religion had absorbed the industrious Toledo of old, and still guarded the dead city beneath its hood of stone.  From some of the belfries a red flag was floating, bearing a white chalice; this meant that some newly-ordained priest was singing his first mass.

“I have never been up here,” said Don Martin, sitting by Gabriel’s side on one of the rafters, “without seeing some of these flags; ecclesiastical recruiting never ceases, there are always visionaries to fill its ranks.  Those who really have faith are the minority, the greater part enter because they see the Church still triumphant and seemingly commanding, and they think that in her ranks some tremendous career is waiting for them.  Unlucky wights!  I also was led to the altar with music and oratorical shouts, as though I were walking to a triumph.  Incense spread its clouds before my eyes, all my family wept with emotion at seeing me nothing less than a minister of God.  And the day following all this theatrical pomp, when the lights and the censers were extinguished and the church had recovered its ordinary aspect, began this miserable life of poverty and intrigue to earn one’s bread ­seven duros a month!  To endure at all hours the complaints of those poor women, with their tempers embittered by seclusion, common as the lowest servants, who spend their lives gossiping in the parlour of what is passing in the towns, inventing scandals to please the canons, or the families who protect the house.  And there are priests who envy me! hungering against me for this coveted chaplaincy of nuns! looking upon me as a flattering hanger-on of the archiepiscopal palace, not understanding how otherwise, being so young, I could have hooked out this preferment that allows me to live in Toledo on seven duros a month!”

Gabriel nodded his head, sympathising with the young priest’s complaints.

“Yes, it is you who are deceived.  The day for making great fortunes in the Church is past, and the poor youths who now wear the cassock and dream of a mitre make me think of those emigrants who go to distant countries famous through long centuries of plunder, and find them even more poverty-stricken than their own land.”

“You are right, Gabriel.  The day of the all-powerful Church is past; she has still in her udders milk enough for all, but there are few who can fasten on to them and fill themselves to repletion, while others groan with hunger.  One could die of laughing when one hears of the equality and the democratic spirit of the Church.  It is all a lie; in no other institution does so cruel a despotism reign.  In early days Popes and bishops were elected by the faithful, and were deposed from power if they used it badly.  The aristocracy of the Church exists still; it may be a canon upwards, or one who succeeds in crowning himself with a mitre; from them no account is required.  Among the laity appointments are changed, ministers are turned out, soldiers are degraded ­even kings are dethroned; but who exacts responsibility from Pope or bishops once they are anointed and in more or less frequent intercourse with the Holy Spirit?  If you want Justice you are sent before tribunals equally formed by the aristocrats of the Church; there is no power more absolute on earth, not even the Grand Turk, who in a measure is responsible through fear of revolts in his seraglio.  Here, in the seraglio of the Church, we are all less than women.  If it happens that a priest, weary of persecution, feeling the man once more rising beneath his cassock, deals a heavy blow at his tyrant, he is declared mad; the climax of hypocrisy!  They try to demonstrate that in the Church one lives in the best of worlds, and it is only the lack of reason that causes any rebellion against its authority.”

Don Martin was silent for a long while as though he were searching in his memory; at length he continued: 

“You also laugh at the idea of the actual poverty of the Church in Spain.  She is like the great ruined noblemen, who still have enough to live upon in idleness, but who think themselves miserably poor compared to their former wealth; the Church has the nostalgia of those former centuries when she possessed half the wealth of Spain.  Poor she is if she thinks of those times, but if you compare her with the Catholicism of other modern nations you find that, as in former years, she is by far the most favoured and best paid establishment in the State.  She absorbs forty-one millions of the revenue, which is enormous in a country which only devotes nine millions to schools and teaching, and one million to the relief of the poor.  To maintain an intercourse with God costs a Spaniard five times as much as to learn to read.  But this forty-one millions is a blind.  My own poverty made me inquisitive, and I wished to know what the clergy in Spain really receive, and what comes to our hands, the rank and file.  The demands and pensions of the Church are an intricate tangle, apart from the forty-one millions.  There is not a single ministry in which the Church has not struck her roots; she is paid by the Ministers of State for foreign missions, which are no use to anyone, by the Ministers of War and Marine for military clergy, and by the Ministers of Public Instruction and Justice.  She is paid to support the pomp of the Roman Pontiff, as we maintain his ambassador in Spain, which is as though I allowed myself the luxury of keeping servants, and laid on my neighbour the obligation of paying them.  She is paid for the repairs to churches, for episcopal libraries, for the colonisation of Fernando Po, for unforeseen occurrences, and I do not know how many supplemental items besides!  And you must take into account what the Spanish people pay the Church voluntarily apart from what the State gives.  The Bull of the Holy Crusade produces two and a half million pesetas annually; besides this you must consider what the parochial clergy draw from their congregations, the annual gifts to the religious orders for their ministry and offices (and this is the fattest portion), and the ecclesiastical revenue from the Ayuntamientos and deputations.  In short, this Church, which is continually speaking of its poverty, draws from the State and the country more than three hundred million pesetas annually ­nearly double what the army costs; although they are always complaining in the sacristies of these modern times, saying that everything is devoured by the military, and that the fault of everything that has happened is theirs, as they threw themselves on to the side of that cursed liberty.  Three hundred millions, Gabriel!  I have calculated it carefully!  And I, who form part of this great establishment, receive seven duros a month; the greater part of the vicars in Spain are paid less than an excise officer, and thousands of clergy live from hand to mouth, wandering from sacristy to sacristy trying to obtain a mass to put the stew on the fire; and if bands of clergy do not go into the highways to rob, it is only from fear of the civil guard, and because after a couple of days of hunger a third may come in which they may beg some scraps to eat; there is always a crumb to allay hunger, and no cassock ever falls in the street dying of want, but there are a great many clerics who spend their existence deceiving their stomachs, trying to imagine they nourish themselves, till some sudden illness comes which hurries them out of the world.  Where, then, does all this money go?  To the aristocracy of the Church, to the true sacerdotal caste; but we who are in religion are people of the backstairs.  What a terrible mistake, Gabriel!  To renounce love and family affection, to fly all worldly pleasures, the theatre, concerts, the cafe; to be looked upon by people, even by those who think themselves religious, as a strange being, a sort of intermediate, neither a man nor a woman; to wear petticoats and to be dressed like a lugubrious doll; and in exchange for all these sacrifices to earn less than a man who breaks stones on the road.  We live idly, certain that we shall never fall from over-work, but our poverty is greater than that of many workmen; we cannot acknowledge it, nor put ourselves in the way of begging alms, for the honour of our cloth.  And besides, why should they keep us if we are of no practical use and cost the country so dear?  When the religious domination came to an end in Spain it was only we, the lower ones, who suffered in consequence.  The priest is poor, the temple is poor also; but the prince of the Church retains his thousands of duros yearly, and his great ecclesiastical state, and he sings his psalms tranquilly, certain that his pittance is in no danger.  The revolution up to now has only prejudiced the lower clergy; the power of the Church is ended, it is gone; what we see is only its corpse, but an enormous corpse that will cost a great deal to remove, and whose preservation will swallow up a great deal of money.”

“It is true the Church is defunct; what we fight are only its remains.  The vulgar believe it still lives because they can see and touch it, forgetting that a religion counts centuries in its life as minutes, and that generation after generation pass between its death and burial.  Centuries before the birth of Jesus Paganism had fallen.  The Athenian poets mocked the gods of Olympus on the stage, and the philosophers despised it.  All the same Christianity required many years of propaganda and the political support of the Caesars to bring it to an end, and even then it was not done with, for dogmas are like men who leave behind something of themselves in the family who succeed them.  Religions do not disappear suddenly through a trapdoor; they are extinguished slowly, leaving some of their beliefs and their ceremonies to the religions that follow them.  We have been born in one of those times of transition, we are present at the death of a whole world of beliefs.  How long will the agony last?  Who knows?  Two centuries?  Possibly less may be wanted to crystallise in humanity a fresh proof of its uncertainty and of its fear of the great mystery of nature, but death is certain, inevitable.  But what religion has been eternal?  The symptoms of dissolution are visible everywhere.  Where is that faith that drove those warlike multitudes to the crusades?  Where is that fervour which continued building cathedrals for a couple of hundred years with angelic patience to shelter a host under a mountain of stone?  Who scourges themselves to-day, or tortures their flesh, or lives in the desert musing continually on death and hell?  Three centuries of intolerance and of excessive clerical severity have made our nation the most indifferent to all religious matters.  The ceremonies of worship are followed by routine, because they appeal to the imagination, but no one takes the trouble to understand the foundations of the beliefs they profess; they live as they please, certain that in their last hours it is sufficient to save their souls, to die surrounded by priests with a crucifix in their hands.  In former days the pressure from clergy, friars, and inquisitors was so great that the machine of faith burst into a thousand pieces, and there is no one now who can fit the pieces together, which require the co-operation of all.  And that was a piece of good luck, friend Don Martin; a century more of religious intolerance and we should have been like those Mussulmen in Africa, who live in barbarism on account of their excessive bigotry, after having been the civilising Arabs of Cordoba and Granada.”

“Do you know,” said the young curate, “why Catholicism has held up its appearances of power?  It is because from ancient times, in all Latin countries, it has possessed itself of every avenue through which human life must pass.”

“It is true, no religion has been so cautious as ours, or has ambushed itself better to entrap men.  None has chosen with such certainty in the time of power the positions it can hold strongly in its decadence.  It is impossible to move without stumbling against her.  She knows of old that man as long as he is healthy, in the plenitude of his vital strength, is by instinct irreligious.  When he lives comfortable the so-called eternal life concerns him very little.  He only believes in God and fears Him in the hour of supreme cowardice, when death opens before him the bottomless pit of nothingness, and his pride as a rational animal revolts against the complete extinction of his being.  He wishes his soul to be immortal, and so he accepts the religious phantasies of heaven and hell.  The Church, fearing the irreligiousness of health, has occupied, as you say, all the avenues of life, so that no man shall accustom himself to live without her, appealing solely to her in the hour of death.  The dead provide much money, they are her best asset; but she wishes equally to reign over the living.  Nothing escapes her despotism and her spying.  She insinuates herself into all human concerns from the greatest to the most insignificant, she interferes in both public and private life; she baptizes the child when it comes into the world, accompanies the child to school, monopolises love, declaring it shameful and abominable if it does not submit to her benediction, and divides the earth into two categories ­the consecrated, for those who die in her bosom, and the dunghill in the open air for the heretic.  The Church interferes in dress, laying down what is honest and Christian wear and what is scandalous frivolity.  She interferes in the most intimate relations of domestic life, and even penetrates into the kitchen, turning Catholicism into a culinary art, ruling what ought to be eaten, what ought or ought not to be mixed, and anathematizing certain foods, which, being good enough the rest of the year, become the most horrible sacrilege if partaken on certain days.  She accompanies a man from his birth, and does not leave him even after he is laid in the tomb; she keeps him chained by his soul, making it wander through space, passing from one place to another, ascending the pathway to heaven, according to the sacrifices imposed on themselves by his successors for the benefit of the Church.  A greater or more complete despotism no tyrant could possibly imagine.”

It was mid-day.  The bell-ringer had disappeared; suddenly the rattle of chains and pulleys was heard and a dull thunder made the tower tremble; all the stones and metal and even the surrounding ether vibrated.  The big “Gorda” had just rung, deafening the bystanders.  A few moments afterwards, from the front of the Alcazar, came the sound of martial music, trumpets, and drums.

“Let us go,” said Gabriel.  “Really, Mariano might have warned us and spared us this surprise.”

And he added, smiling ironically: 

“It is always the same; it is the parasites who shine the most and make the most noise; they make up in noise what they lack in utility.”

The festival of Corpus drew near without anything occurring to ruffle the quiet life of the Cathedral.  Sometimes in the upper cloister they spoke of His Éminence’s health.  His serious quarrels with the Chapter had obliged him to keep his bed, and he had just had an attack which made them fear for his life.

“It is his heart,” said the Tato ­who was usually very well informed about things in the palace ­“Dona Visita is weeping like a Magdalen and cursing the canons, seeing Don Sebastian so ill.”

As Wooden Staff sat down to table with his family he began to speak of the decadence of the feast of Corpus, which had been so famous in Toledo in former times.  In his desire to complain he forgot the bitter silence he had imposed on himself in his daughter’s presence.

“You will hardly recognise our Corpus,” he said to Gabriel.  “Of all that we remember nothing remains but the famous tapestries that are hung outside the Cathedral.  The giants are not drawn up before the Puerta del Perdón, and the procession is shorn of its glory.”

The Chapel-master also complained bitterly.

“And the mass, Senor Esteban?  Just think what a mass for such a solemn festivity!  Four instruments from outside the house, and a Rossini mass of the lightest description so as not to cost much.  It would have been far better for this to have played the organ alone.”

According to an ancient custom, on the vesper before the feast, the band of the Academy of Infantry played in the evening before the Cathedral.  All Toledo came to hear the serenade, which was an event in the monotonous life of the town, and from the province of Madrid many strangers came for the bull-fight on the following day.

Mariano, the bell-ringer, invited his friends to listen to the serenade from the Greco-Roman gallery on the principal front.  At the hour when the lights were usually extinguished in the Claverías and Don Antolin locked the street door, Gabriel and his friends glided cautiously to the bell-ringer’s “habitación.”  Sagrario was also persuaded to come by her uncle, who in this way managed to tear her from her machine.  She really must enjoy some little amusement; she ought to appear in the world now and then; she was killing herself with all that tiresome work.

They all sat in the gallery.  The shoemaker had brought his wife, always with a small baby at her flabby breast.  The Tato was talking delightedly to the organ-blower and the verger about the bull-fight on the following day, and Mariano stood by his adored comrade, while his wife, a woman as rough as himself, spoke with Sagrario.

The men were deploring the absence of Don Martin.  Probably he had gone down below among the people who filled the square, doubtless dreading that he must be up before daybreak to say mass to the nuns.

The palace of the Ayuntamiento was decorated with strings of light, which were reflected on to the façade of the Cathedral, giving the stones a rosy flush as of fire.

Among the trees walked groups of girls with flowers and white blouses, like the first appearances of spring.  The cadets followed them, their hands on the pommels of their swords, walking along with their pinched-in waists and their full pantaloons a la Turc.  The archiepiscopal palace remained entirely closed.  Above the rosy light in the piazza, spread the beautiful summer sky, clear and deep, spangled with innumerable brilliant stars.

When the music ceased, and the lights began to fade, the inhabitants of the Cathedral felt unwilling to leave their seats.  They were very comfortable there, the night was warm, and they, accustomed to the confinement and the silence of the Claverías, felt the joy of freedom, sitting on that balcony with Toledo at their feet and the immensity of space above them.

Sagrario, who had never been out of the upper cloister since her return to the paternal roof, looked at the stars with delight.

“How many stars!” she murmured dreamily.

“There are more than usual to-night,” said the bell-ringer.  “The summer sky seems a field of stars in which the harvest increases with the fine weather.”

Gabriel smiled at the simplicity of his companions.  They all wondered at God, so foreseeing and so thoughtful, who had made the moon to give light to men by night, and the stars so that the darkness should not be complete.

“Well, then,” inquired Gabriel, “why is there not a moon always if it was made to give us light?”

There was a long silence.  They were all thinking over Gabriel’s question.  The bell-ringer, being most intimate with the master, ventured to put the question about which they were all thinking.  “What were the heavens, and what was there beyond the blue?”

The square was now deserted and in darkness, there was no light but the gentle shimmering of the stars scattered in space like golden dust.  From the immense vault there seemed to fall a religious calm, an overwhelming majesty that stirred the souls of those simple people.  The infinite seemed to bewilder them with its vast grandeur.

“You,” said Gabriel, “have your eyes closed to immensity, you cannot understand it.  You have been taught a wretched and rudimentary origin of the world, imagined by a few ragged and ignorant Jews in a corner of Asia, which, having been written in a book, has been accepted down to our days.  This personal God, like to ourselves in His shape and passions, is an artificer of gigantic capacity, who worked six days and made everything existing.  On the first day He created light, and on the fourth the sun and stars; from whence then came that light if the sun had not then been created?  Is there any distinction between one and the other?  It seems impossible that such absurdities should have been credited for centuries.”

The listeners nodded their heads in assent; the absurdity appeared to them palpable ­as it always did when Gabriel spoke.

“If you wish to penetrate the heavens,” continued Luna, “you must get rid of the human conception of distance.  Man measures everything by his own stature, and he conceives dimensions by the distance his eyes can reach.  This Cathedral seems to us enormous because underneath its naves we seem like ants; but, nevertheless, the Cathedral seen from far is only an insignificant wart; compared with the piece of land we call Spain it is less than a grain of sand, and on the face of the earth it is a mere atom ­nothing.  Our sight makes us consider thirty or forty yards a dizzy height.  At this moment we think we are very high because we are near the roof of the Cathedral, but compared to the infinite this height is as small as when an ant balances on the top of a pebble not knowing how to come down.  Our sight is short, and we who can only measure by yards, and apprehend short distances, must make an immense effort of imagination to realise infinity.  Even then it escapes us and we speak of it very often as of a thing that has no meaning.  How shall I make you understand the immensity of the world?  You must not believe, as our ancestors did, that the earth is flat and stationary and that the heaven is a crystal dome on which God has fastened the stars like golden nails, and in which the sun and moon move to give us light, you must understand that the earth is round, and whirls round in space.”

“Yes, we do know a little about that,” said the bell-ringer doubtfully, “for we were taught so at school.  But, really, do you think it moves?”

“Because in your littleness as human beings, because to our microscopic mole-like sight the immense mechanism of the world is lost, do not for a moment doubt it.  The earth turns.  Without moving from where you are, in twenty-four hours you will have made the complete circuit with the globe.  Without moving our feet we rush along at the rate of four hundred leagues an hour, a velocity that the fastest trains cannot attain.  You are astonished?  We rush along without knowing it.  Our planet does not only turn on itself, but at the same time it turns round the sun at the rate of nearly a hundred thousand miles an hour.  Every second we cover thirty thousand miles.  Men have never invented a cannon ball that could fly so quickly.  You move through space fixed to a projectile which whirls with dizzy speed, and, deceived by your smallness, you think you are living immovable in a dead cathedral.  And this velocity is as nothing compared with others.  The sun round which we turn, flies and flies through space, carrying on by its attraction the earth and the other planets.  It goes through immensity, dragging us along, travelling towards the unknown, without ever striking other bodies, finding always sufficient space to move in with a rapidity which makes one giddy; and this has gone on for thousands and millions of centuries without either it or the earth who follows it in its flight ever passing twice over the same spot.”

They all listened to Gabriel open-mouthed with astonishment, and their bright eyes seemed dazed and bewildered.

“It is enough to drive one mad,” murmured the bell-ringer.  “What then is man, Gabriel?”

“Nothing; even as this earth, which seems so large, and that we have peopled with religions, kingdoms and revelations from God, is nothing.  Dreams of ants! even less!  This same sun which seems so enormous compared to our globe is nothing more than an atom in immensity.  What you call stars are other suns like ours, surrounded by planets like our earth, but which are invisible on account of their small size.  How many are they?  Man brings his optical instruments to perfection and is able to pierce further into the fields of heaven, discovering ever more and more.  Those which are scarcely visible in the infinite appear much nearer when a new telescope is invented, and beyond them in the depths of space others and again others appear, and so on everlastingly.  They are unaccountable.  Some are worlds inhabited like ours; others were so, and revolve solitary in space, waiting for a fresh evolution of life; many are still forming; and yet all these worlds are no more than corpuscles of the luminous mist of the infinite.  Space is peopled by fires that have burnt for millions, trillions and quadrillions of centuries, throwing out heat and light.  The milky way is nothing but a cloud of stars that seem to us as one mass, but which in reality are so far apart that thousands of suns like ours with all their planets could revolve among them without ever coming into collision.”

Gabriel remembered the travelling of sound and light.  “Their velocity is insignificant compared with the distances in space.  The sun, which is the nearest to us, is still so far that for a sound to go from us to it would take three millions of years.  Poor human beings will never be able to travel with the rapidity of sound.

“These suns travel like ours towards the unknown with giddy flight, but they are so distant that three or four thousand years may pass without man being aware that they have moved more than a finger’s breadth.  The distances of infinity are maddening.  The sun is a nebula of inflammatory gas, and the earth an imperceptible molecule of sand.

“The luminous ray of the Polar star requires half a century to reach our eyes; it might have disappeared forty-nine years ago, and still we should see it in space.

“And all these worlds are created, grow and die like human beings.  In space there is no more rest than on earth.  Some stars are extinguished, others vary, and others shine with all the power of their young life.  The dead planets dissolved by fires furnish the material for new worlds; it is a perpetual renewal of forms, throughout millions and millions of centuries, that represent in their lives what the few dozen years to which we are limited, are in our own.  And beyond all those incalculable distances there is space, and more space on every side, with fresh conglomerations of worlds without limit or end.”

Gabriel spoke in the midst of solemn silence.  The listeners closed their eyes as if such immensity stunned them.  They followed in imagination Gabriel’s description, but their narrowed minds wished to place a term to the infinite, and in their simplicity they imagined beyond these incalculable distances a vault of firm matter millions of leagues thick.  Surely all that strange and fantastic work must have a limit.  What was at the back of it?  And the barrier created by their imagination fell suddenly; and again they flew through space, always infinite, with ever new worlds.

Gabriel spoke of them and of their life with absolute certainty.  Spectral analysis showed the same composition in the stars as on the earth, consequently if life had arisen in our atom, most certainly it must exist in other celestial bodies, though probably in different forms; in many planets it had already ended, in many it was still to come; but surely all those millions of worlds had had, or would have, life.

Religions, wishing to explain the origin of the world, paled and trembled before the infinite.  It was like the Cathedral tower, which covered with its bulk a great part of the heavens, hiding millions of worlds, but which was of insignificant size compared to the immensity it hid, less than an infinitesimal part of a molecule ­nothing.  It seemed very great because it was close to men, concealing immensity, but when men looked above it, getting a full grasp of the infinite, they laughed at its Lilliputian pride.

“Then,” inquired timidly the old organ-blower, pointing to the Cathedral, “what is it they teach us in there?”

“Nothing,” replied Gabriel.

“And what are we ­men?” asked the Perrero.

“Nothing.”

“And the governments, the laws, and the customs of society?” inquired the bell-ringer.

“Nothing.  Nothing.”

Sagrario fixed her eyes, grown larger by her earnest contemplation of the heavens, on her uncle.

“And God,” she asked in a soft voice; “where is God?”

Gabriel stood up, leaning on the balustrade of the gallery; his figure stood out dark and clear against the starry space.

“We are God ourselves, and everything that surrounds us.  It is life with its astonishing transformations, always apparently dying, yet always being infinitely renewed.  It is this immensity that astounds us with its greatness, and that cannot be realised in our minds.  It is matter that lives, animated by the force that dwells in it, with absolute unity, without separation or duality.  Man is God, and the world is God also.”

He was silent for a moment and then added with energy: 

“But if you ask me for that personal God invented by religions, in the likeness of a man, who brought the world out of nothing, who directs our actions, who classifies souls according to their merits, and commissions Sons to descend into the world to redeem it, I say seek for Him in that immensity, see where He hides His littleness.  But even if you were immortal you might spend millions of years passing from one star to another without ever finding the corner where He hides His deposed despotic majesty.  This vindictive and capricious God arose in men’s brains, and the brain is a human being’s most recent organ, the last to develop itself.  When man invented God the world had existed millions of years.”