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                             NACHA REGULES

                             NACHA REGULES

                                  BY

                             MANUEL GÁLVEZ

          _Authorized Translation from the Original Spanish_

                                  BY

                              LEO ONGLEY

                               NEW YORK
                        E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
                           681 FIFTH AVENUE

                            Copyright, 1922
                       By E. P. Dutton & Company

                         _All Rights Reserved_

                         PRINTED IN THE UNITED
                           STATES OF AMERICA

                               CONTENTS

            CHAPTER                                        PAGE

               I                                            1

              II                                           18

             III                                           31

              IV                                           45

               V                                           55

              VI                                           68

             VII                                           86

            VIII                                           99

              IX                                          111

               X                                          126

              XI                                          137

             XII                                          148

            XIII                                          158

             XIV                                          173

              XV                                          187

             XVI                                          199

            XVII                                          211

           XVIII                                          219

             XIX                                          230

              XX                                          243

             XXI                                          255

            XXII                                          265

           XXIII                                          281

            XXIV                                          293

           EPILOGUE                                       301

                             NACHA REGULES

                             NACHA REGULES

                               CHAPTER I

An August night! Hot with the fever of her adolescence as a national
capital, Buenos Aires was ablaze with millions of lights and rejoicing
in noisy revelry.

The Centennial festivities had been going on since May. Thousands
of people had flocked in from every corner of the country, from
neighboring states and even from Europe. During these great days of
a nation's coming of age, the crowd, in one enormous, slowly moving
procession, thronged the asphalt pavements of the principle avenues.
The very streets and houses appeared to be in motion. When, toward
evening, the multitude increased, the congestion caused a swelling
which, it seemed, must at a given moment burst the bounds on either
side. At night some forty theatres, and innumerable movie-houses and
concert halls, crammed overflowing masses into their hungry maws, while
in the cabarets boisterous licence rubbed elbows with curiosity.

The cabaret, of "the Port"--as Argentina calls its chief city--is a
public dance hall: it provides a room, tables for drinking, and an
orchestra. The patrons are young men of the upper classes with their
mistresses; tourists and rustic sight-seers; and girls "of the town,"
who come alone. The tango, almost the only dance seen there, and the
orchestra, composed usually of white gangsters and mulattos are--with
the champagne bottle and the tuxedo--the normal expressions of the
Argentine suburban "soul"!

The musicians sing, shout, strike on the wooden pans of their
instruments, gesticulate. The silhouettes of the dancers twist and
intertwine, weave in and out across the floor, blend, and neutralize
each other; and the mandola, with its dark low tones, underlines the
tangos with long shadows of pain.

But there are other things in the cabaret besides dancing. On some
nights a sudden outburst of noise, from end to end of the hall, cuts
the tango in two, as it were, with an enormous, quivering gash. A man's
persistent ogling of another fellow's girl, a violent collision of
dancers, the suspicion of ridicule or insult, bring threats from mouths
contorted with anger, while revolvers are flourished in the air. The
_patota_, the inevitable leading actor in such scenes, is a group of
wealthy roisterers whose greatest pleasure is to annoy, insult, attack
with fist or weapon, in short, transform peaceable pleasure seeking
into a tavern brawl. To show resentment toward a _patota_, to resist
its aggressions, is to invite a drubbing from a pack trained to fight
as a gang, or an unfailing bullet fired treacherously from behind.

On that August night, in one of these crowded cabarets, frenzied
dancing was going on. Some gigantic invisible hand seemed to be
reaching down from the top of the hall, and incessantly stirring the
couples round and round. All the tables were full. Champagne bottles
raised their aristocratic necks from the icy prisons which held them.
Under the glow of the lights evening gowns blazed dazzlingly, and
the women's flesh shone gleaming, vibrant, golden, from the low cut
dresses. Tangos, tangos, more tangos! With the speed of a movie film,
and in chance groupings, graceful poses and involuntary caricatures
were sketched. The musicians, caught up in the madness of the throng,
shouted phrases of double meanings caught up for the purpose from the
latest song hits. A couple of "professionals" suddenly emerged, amidst
wild applause, from the common herd of the dance, which opened from the
centre to make way; and there, surrounded by a ring of faces, incited
by exclamations, admiring and picturesque, the two embraced, separated,
and came together again, interminably, with minutely patterned steps
and attitudes, to the music of an uneasy, sensuous, odorous tango,
which the mandola tried to sentimentalize with the wails of its deeper
notes.

When the exhibition was over, many eyes turned toward a man sitting
alone at a little table, conspicuous because he was so gloomy and
preoccupied, so completely indifferent to everything that was going on
around him. He was well dressed in a black suit that suggested both
elegance and severity. His face attracted; magnetic, it might have been
called; here, one felt, was a personality, a man who had fought his way
up in life through suffering. His features wore an expression of mental
and moral disquietude.

Unaccompanied save by his own thoughts, he was, nevertheless, furtively
watching a young girl who, with several other people, sat at a table
near by. This man was not in nor of the cabaret. When his gaze was not
fixed on his pretty neighbor it seemed to be seeking distant worlds,
wandering, perhaps, in search of something to fill his solitude or to
offer to this girl in one single passionate glance.

The youths with whom she was sitting formed a _patota_ of five. She
was dividing their attentions with three other women at the table. The
men did not belong to aristocratic society, though they were of "good
family" as the _porteños_--the people of Buenos Aires--say; the names
of their fathers', that is, were well-known in politics and business,
and appeared frequently in the society columns of the newspapers. As
individuals they had no distinction. They talked in loud, obtrusive
voices, using terms of gross familiarity in addressing one another.
When they laughed it was in a bellowing hilarity calculated to attract
attention; just as, when they danced, it was with tremendous waggles of
hips and shoulders. Of their champagne they were noisily ostentatious.
It was now mid-winter in Buenos Aires; but they were wearing light
suits and flashy neckties. Typical Argentine "sports" in short!

The girl, who had so impressed the solitary stranger, was taking no
part in the animation around her. Her quiet melancholy shadowed a
rather long face, a pair of burning dark eyes, a mouth that might
have been called too large. Everything about her contributed to the
tragic attractiveness of her person: the wide hat, which accentuated a
child-like quality in her; the elegance, somewhat affectedly careless,
of her dress; the relaxed indifference with which she moved her long
arms--thin but shapely, and covered, to above the elbow, by white
gloves. The low cut of her dress drew one's eye to the faint golden
tints of her skin. Her hair, of a dull golden shade, fell in loops over
her ears to form a frame for her features.

He observed that she was vainly trying to be merry, and to laugh with
her companions; but depression had obstinately seized on her, and she
lacked the will to master it. A moment came when her gloom increased
to the point of tears, and her companions remarked it. One of them, in
whom drink was already at work, cried out:

"What's the matter with you? Have you got the pip?"

He was a graceless individual, ugly, flat-nosed, restless, loud-voiced,
constantly gesticulating, whom the others called "the Duck."

His friends greeted this witticism with bursts of laughter. The girl
herself forced a smile in which the man at the neighboring table caught
something of her suffering. His facial muscles contracted slightly.

"Give her another swig of booze--it's good for what ails her!" bawled
the "Duck," inspired by the success of his previous venture.

"Don't mind him, Nacha!" said one of the women coldly, not as much from
real sympathy as from a sense of feminine loyalty.

Again there were outbursts of laughter in the group, and even from
people at other tables who had begun to listen. The girl, embarrassed,
mortified, looked timidly about in every direction. When her eyes met
those of the man who was sitting alone her self-consciousness increased.

The orchestra came to the end of a tango and, in the quiet which
followed, the members of the _patota_ set out to "rag" Nacha. One
of them, who seemed to be her "man," egged the others on. The women
playfully sided against her. Soon almost all the cabaret was taking
part in the game. At last Nacha, unable to endure the banter longer,
laid her face in her hands. The "Duck" moaned in burlesque: "Oh, Oh,
Oh!" while some of the spectators near by almost unhinged their jaws in
a roar of laughter, or chorused with the mourner in ridicule: "Oh, Oh,
Oh!"

"See here, you are making a fool of me in public!" exclaimed Nacha's
lover--and he added an oath.

Again the orchestra struck up a tango. The languid notes, the limping
rhythms, the thick, bee-like murmur of the mandola, came to drown both
curses and laughter alike. Again the couples were out on the floor,
here swinging together in tight embrace, there stilting along with
bodies stiffly erect and faces grave.

Nacha's "man" got up to dance with her. When, however, the girl
resisted, he lifted her violently in his arms and set her down in the
middle of the hall.

"Let me alone! I can't dance...."

"You are going to dance, I tell you.... You are only putting on!"

"But don't you see? I can't ... oh, please!"

The fellow grasped her around the waist and plunged with her into the
rhythmic whirl on the floor. The man who sat alone had started at the
brutality he was witnessing, as though a question had suddenly been
settled in his mind. Something dramatic seemed about to happen, and
many eyes watched him uneasily.

Nacha, with no heart for the dance, was not long in freeing herself
and returning to the table; now it was quite unoccupied, since all her
companions were on the floor. Her escort followed smiling with rage,
and sitting down beside her, began apparently to insult and threaten
her. His lower jaw was thrown far forward as he spoke; his teeth came
tight together, and his lips twisted themselves into all the grimaces
expressing anger and contempt.

"You'll pay for this ... as soon as we get out of here!" he said; and
meanwhile he clutched her arm in a grip that hurt.

The stranger was now looking closely at the man. The latter was a tall
strapping fellow, stockily built. His wide, close-shaven face showed
a scar across the chin. He had broad shoulders, a dark skin; and his
small hard eyes glittered with something of an Indian's haughtiness
and sinister ferocity. A large pearl adorned his made-up necktie. He
wore white spats over his patent leather shoes, and large rings on his
fingers.

There are plenty of men like this among the _porteños_! As vulgar as
they are rich, they are always showing off their dollars and their
women. They each set up a _ménage_ with some pretty girl--for otherwise
they would lose "standing." They spend their evenings in the theatres
and their nights in the cabarets or, for adventure, ragging with their
pals and their sweethearts some convenient victim; drinking champagne,
making an uproar, annoying everyone, bellowing at one another. Noisy,
aggressive, intrusive, they allow no one to look too pryingly, too
persistently, at them! Their right forefingers itch for the feel of
a revolver--an appendage that Nature should, to please them, have
grown on their right hands. Women, in their eyes, are mechanical
toys, objects without human feelings, to be bought and sold as such.
And yet women become attached to them; perhaps because they like the
manliness that such violence attests; or because these fellows show
their women off, give them distinction--of a certain kind. Passion also
inclines them to a certain fidelity at times. Some of them moreover are
university men, or belong to prominent families. However, they are all
office-seekers, all gamblers. They "go across" to Europe occasionally,
insulting well-bred people by their arrogance and their grossness as
_nouveaux riches_. In Paris they are always accompanied by _cocottes_,
and make disturbances in dance halls and cabarets to advertise their
South-American spirit and self-sufficiency. A repulsive type, in
short: a mixture of the barbarian and of the civilized human being,
of the gangster and the respectable citizen. The urban descendent of
the Argentine cow-puncher is an individual without scruples, morals or
discipline, with no law but caprice, and no ideal but pleasure.

Meanwhile Nacha, her face in her hands, was weeping. Her tormentor grew
angrier, raised his voice to a higher, more resonant pitch, threatened
her still more violently, called her hysterical, ridiculous, said
she was surely "kidding." Anything would succeed better with him, he
shouted, than cry-babying, and putting on.... At the single table near
by, the stranger was looking on intently, his features tense with
silent determination. How much longer could a self-respecting man hold
out against the challenge of that brutality?

The rapier-thrust of a violin bow gave the death stab to a dying tango.
The _patoteros_ and their women returned to their table. The fellow who
had wept vociferously before broke out again into mock lamentations
at sight of Nacha's tears. He stood up, rubbing his fists into his
eyes, and bawling grotesquely, like the dunce in school. His mirth
caught the mood of the entire cabaret. Every atom of it quivered in
titters of laughter. The butt of all this humor, hardened by this time,
was shedding her tears inwardly now. She even feigned indifference,
shrugging her shoulders and forcing her lips into an expression of
disdain. But the man who was watching saw confessed suffering in her
still reddened eyes.

When the next tango crushed this wretched farce under its innumerable
feet, another of the _patota's_ members, a tall thin youth, with a
girlishly slender waist, asked Nacha to dance with him.

"I said I didn't want to dance!"

"What?" Her lover sprang toward her and seized her by the arms,
determined to force her to her feet.

"Oh, please! I can't! ... I can't!"

"What do you mean--'can't'!"

The contest lasted only a second. The man won, inevitably. Pulling the
girl out of her chair he dragged her along to the centre of the room,
so that his friend could have a dance with her. But in his anger he
gave one push so violent that she fell to the floor.

And then something unheard of happened. The man who was alone had risen
suddenly at the beginning of the struggle. Now, to the stupefaction
of everyone, he stepped coolly forward. The crowd quivered with
excitement. A ring of uneasy faces formed around the chief actors in
the scene. The tango was broken off; the sombre moan of the mandola was
all that remained of it.

"What do you mean?" the girl's lover spat at him, while a leer of
primitive hatred flashed in his Indian eyes, now smaller and harder
than ever.

The coolness of the intruder amazed the crowd. He faced the fellow
calmly and addressed him with apparent indifference. Nothing but a
jerking of his lip muscles and a slight trembling of his hands betrayed
the indignation in him. He looked steadily at the man in front of him
and said slowly:

"You will please stop ill-treating this girl!"

No one could tell whether such coolness were due to foolhardiness or
to real courage. The man was of average, if not less than average
build, easy picking, obviously, for that semi-Indian and his pals, who
could finish him off in a jiffy, with fists or revolvers, as _patota_
preferences and custom might decide. The other members of the party
meanwhile stood about in paralyzed amazement that any one should
presume to call one of their fellows to account.

"What's that?" the fellow asked, as though he had not heard distinctly.

"Stop ill-treating this...."

A sudden attack from the four other members of the _patota_ cut off the
end of his sentence. At the same moment the onlookers discreetly drew
back. A chair was knocked over. There was a rush to get out through the
narrow doorway.

"Hold on there! Leave this fellow to me!" roared Nacha's owner. The
air was dotted for a moment with clenched, up-raised fists. Seeing his
friends still hedging the intruder about, their eagerness to attack
unappeased, the fellow pushed them back one by one toward their table.
Then he wheeled around on the spectators.

"This is nothing to stop dancing for, gentlemen!" To the musicians he
shouted: "Go on with the music! Give us a tango!"

The orchestra, which had disintegrated during the scene, assembled
around the music-stands again. After a few moments of aimless strumming
it began a dance in quick time. The crowd, partly out of respect for
the bully, and partly out of anxiety to dance down an incident which,
if repeated, could only end in a shooting, began another tango. No one
cared to return to a danger once safely passed.

Meanwhile the two men stood facing one another.

"You don't know me!" said the girl's lover at last, pulling at the
rings on his fingers as though to busy his hands, so eager to be at
the throat of the man opposite him. "You don't know me--but I know
you! You are Dr. Fernando Monsalvat. Well sir, let me give you a
suggestion. Leave us alone, and get out of here at once. You are older
than I--forty at least. I am only thirty, very fit, and used to these
affairs; and my friends are with me, their sleeves rolled up already,
you might say. Just go along home! Don't be throwing your life away!
And if I give you so much good advice _gratis_, it's because I have my
reasons for doing so!"

The fellow's friends looked at one another inquiringly.

Who could that man be? What reasons did their comrade have to prevent
them from breaking the presumptuous fool's head? The girl, seated at
the table, kept her eyes on her champion. The orchestra was playing a
wailing dance, limping with pauses, and mournful with the sighs of the
mandola. There were many couples dancing, the women clinging to their
partners' necks.

Monsalvat heard the man out in silence. He replied coolly:

"You can keep your advice to yourself! Meantime I want you to stop
ill-treating that poor girl!"

"That poor girl!"

The fellow took a step backward as though about to "rush" his opponent.
Rapidly his eyes took in everything around him. One hand felt for his
revolver. But Monsalvat's self-possession held the rowdy in check.
Perplexed, and already beaten, he began to feel ridiculous. This man
was not trying to provoke him; neither did he fear him. He saw that the
crowd and his companions had not noticed his compromising move; and
he decided he could calm down without loss of prestige. Two or three
minutes passed. Monsalvat waited as though entrenched in silence and
calm. Something emanated from him which quite disconcerted his enemy.
The latter lay aside his swaggering and said with a forced sarcastic
laugh:

"You know, I am afraid of you! That is why I don't touch you. You are
a regular man-eater, you see,--and that makes me spare my friends! I
don't want to see them beaten up!..."

He stopped short, for his sarcasm quite obviously fell flat, even in
his own estimation. He approached Monsalvat, and putting a hand on his
shoulder said:

"See here, Monsalvat, it's lucky for you that it was I you ran across
here ... however ... well ... never mind all that.... I'm going to make
you see you're wrong. I'm going to let you talk with her. You can ask
her any questions you see fit."

He went up to the girl and brought her back to introduce her.
Ashen-pale, embarrassed, she smiled an absurd little smile, probably to
hide her fear of some fatal outcome to the scene. Her eyes tremulously
nestled for a moment in Monsalvat's steady gaze; but the voice of her
master drove them from that refuge.

"This gentleman," he guffawed, "thinks I'm a blackguard more or less!
Well, I want you to tell him whether you are satisfied with what I do
for you or not. Tell him the truth, don't be afraid!"

Monsalvat, charmed and saddened, was still looking at Nacha, though he
scarcely saw her. His eyes, softened with a pity intense enough to be
pain, were remodelling a truer image of this girl of the underworld.
She did not dare look at him. Her eyes were raised to her "man." Her
mute question did not, apparently, interest Monsalvat, perhaps because
he knew what the answer would be.

"Answer! Are you satisfied?"

"Yes!"

Her voice was scarcely audible.

"And you have an easy time of it! You have a home, haven't you?"

Nacha saw what she must do. She must speak, declare herself satisfied
with her lot. To do anything else would be to draw down on herself this
man's anger at her champion. So suddenly she began to talk in a torrent
of rambling, half-coherent words.

"Yes. I am satisfied. Why not? I have a home. I'm lucky all right. I
don't have to chase around here and there the way I did before. And my
home is fine. I have all the money I want to spend, and two servants.
What more could I ask? And after all I went through before, it's quiet,
and safe! You don't know what I went through!"

And, once started, she went on endlessly. She seemed to be talking
into space, not addressing anyone in particular, and as if for herself
alone, as if to distract her own attention with her own words. All that
was not for Monsalvat's ears! She would have preferred that Monsalvat
should not hear her at all! The words came out, poured out, beyond the
control of will, much like a somnambulist's chatter. Monsalvat was not
listening. It was enough for him to look at her and be conscious of her
presence. Her gentleness, the tremulousness of her words, the sadness
of her eyes, were what absorbed his whole interest. What she was saying
did not matter. The tango throbbing through the air made him the more
aware of the despairing monotone of her voice. The mandola with its
bitter wail made her tragic melancholy only the more poignant.

Even Nacha's owner seemed for a moment to yield to the strange spell of
these combining sounds. Then he interrupted:

"Well! You see? Are you convinced? Didn't I say she was putting on?"

Throwing back his shoulders, he burst into a laugh that rang with
contempt. The tango was over, so was its spell.

The bully became the bully again. He approached his sweetheart, pushed
her toward his comrades, who were sitting at their table waiting to see
how it would all end.

"Now get out of here!" he said, turning to Monsalvat; "but before you
go, I'll tell you who I am. It's to your interest, friend--just a
moment--we might meet again--take a look at me!"

He was serious now. His right hand slipped through the opening of his
tuxedo and rested on his belt. Then he announced solemnly:

"I am Dalmacio Arnedo, 'Pampa Arnedo,' as they call me."

Monsalvat started. Instinctively he raised a hand, but immediately let
it fall. The five of the _patota_ made a rush for him. At the same
moment someone shouted: "The police!"

The cabaret seethed in confusion. Then suddenly an anxious calm fell
on the room, a forced appearance of peaceableness, prearranged for the
dull eyes of authority.

From the first there had been among the onlookers a certain number
who took sides with Monsalvat. His manner toward the _patota_ won
him sympathizers. Some of them felt that the man had the strength to
support his assurance. The girl herself aroused pity even though no
one had had the courage to speak up in her defence. Two or three of
these most sympathetic, or most prudent, individuals had called for the
police, to have help on hand in case of an outbreak from the rowdies.

As the alarm was given the members of the _patota_ hurried back to
their places. Monsalvat, facing Arnedo, exclaimed:

"You rotter!"

Pampa Arnedo, safely seated at his table, answered with a sinister
smile, while his friends beside him made noises with their lips,
grimaced, and began offering toasts, simulating exaggerated merriment.
Nacha looked pityingly at her protector. Who was this man? What did he
want of her?

The police after a rapid glance around the room decided that "law and
order" were still quite intact, and with solemn prudence went out
again. Monsalvat returned to his table and paid his reckoning. The Duck
began to sing the well-known tune from a popular variety show: "He's
going now, he's going now!..."

The other members of the _patota_, and even some neutrals, joined in
the chorus, "Now, now, he's going now!" Monsalvat, as he got up, saw
that the girl, too, was singing and laughing. He paused a moment,
reproachfully it seemed, his eyes dimmed with tears. Then quietly,
without haste, he left the cabaret, while the fellow who had burlesqued
Nacha's weeping broke out again with his "Oh, oh, oh!"

                              CHAPTER II

Monsalvat had come to a crossroad in his life. For nearly forty years
he had gone straight ahead, never hesitating as to which turning to
take. But now, as though a complete transformation had occurred within
him, he seemed a stranger to himself, and he did not know where this
stranger was going.

Heretofore he had lived without criticizing the world of which he was
a part--which means that he had been fairly happy. But during the past
few months he had come to view life and himself from a critical point
of view, and he had reached the conclusion that as human beings go, he
was one of the unfortunates.

He and his sister Eugenia were illegitimate children. His father, of
the aristocracy, and rich with many millions, had, some five years
before, died suddenly without leaving a will. Fernando was intelligent
and had something of his father's manner and bearing; and as the
legitimate heirs of the Monsalvat fortune were all girls, Fernando
was given a good education while his father was still alive. In order
to keep him away from his mother, an ignorant, irresponsible woman
of the immigrant class, the boy was sent to a boarding school. It
was only during vacations that he saw her. Fernando remembered his
father's visits, the discussions with his mother, the admonitions he
himself always received. Once his father had taken the boy to one of
his ranches near Buenos Aires, a piece of property as big as an entire
state, on which were marvelous forests, a house as magnificent as a
palace, and paddocks full of splendid bulls and woolly sheep. More
clearly than anything else, he remembered how his father took him along
almost stealthily, and replied evasively when a friend, on the train,
asked who the child with him was. Later, at boarding school, some boys
who knew his father's legitimate family, enlightened him as to his own
birth.

When he left college he took up law. He was an excellent student; and
even before any regular admission to the bar, he was filling a place in
the office of a well-known lawyer. Later he became this man's partner,
made money, and won recognition. For a scruple he left the law office
and went to Europe, remaining there two years. When he returned he was
thirty-two. No longer wishing to continue in his profession, he finally
obtained a consulship to an Italian city. It was now six months since
he had returned, after seven years' absence, to settle permanently in
his own country.

Fernando's mother was still living. She was ill, and aged; indeed,
although not yet seventy, she seemed quite decrepit. Her son saw little
of her. She lived with a mulatto servant in a rather poor neighborhood,
in an apartment house facing Lezama Park. Of his own sister he had seen
little.

Monsalvat had lived as do most decent men of his social position. He
had worked hard in his law office, and as consul had rendered services
of distinction. From boyhood, books had been his chief companions.
He had taken up sociology, and from time to time he got an article
published. His opinions were respected and discussed in certain
intellectual circles. Though not socially inclined, and in spite of his
timidity and lack of confidence, he frequented the clubs and theatres
and race courses of Buenos Aires. He was not often present at more
private social affairs, for the circumstances of his birth prevented
his receiving invitations from certain quarters. While a student he
lived on an allowance from his father. Now, on his return from Europe,
he found himself possessed of no other income than three hundred
_pesos_ monthly from a piece of property which his father had given him
upon his passing his law examinations.

The knowledge of his illegitimacy had exercised an incalculable
influence on his character and general outlook on life. When he was a
student certain youths of good family had made it plain that they did
not desire his friendship; and later he had been socially snubbed on
several occasions. He was, however, inclined to exaggerate the number
of these slights. If an acquaintance failed to notice him, as he passed
along the street, he believed the omission an intentional offense. If,
at a dance, a girl chanced to refuse his proffered arm, he was beset
always with the same thought.... "She does not dare to be seen with
me.... She knows!..." If he received in his examinations a lower mark
than the one he thought he must have earned, he did not for a moment
doubt that it was the stigma of his birth which was to blame. Not a day
passed that he did not at some moment revert to this preoccupation. He
bore society no grudge; on the contrary, it seemed to him quite natural
that, dominant ideas being what they are, he should be thought less
of. Nevertheless he felt humiliated, with a vague consciousness that
his value as a social being was diminished by a misfortune beyond his
control.

All this, of course, tended to isolate him, and confirmed his
tendencies toward bookishness. He had no real friends. He felt himself
to be quite alone in life--alone spiritually, that is; for social
relations in abundance could not fail a man of his intellect and
professional position, whose character, moreover, was above reproach,
and who, in spite of an outward coldness and an almost savage shyness
that frequently took possession of him, was a kind and likeable sort of
fellow.

This sense of solitude was tempered, if at all, by one or two
experiences in love. His dealings with women were not those current
among the young men of his generation. Gossip attributed, nevertheless,
sentimental affairs to him, some of them with women of prominence in
the life of the Capital. For Monsalvat, as his acquaintances noted,
knew how to please. There was something that appealed to women in the
soft inflections of his voice, and in the deep seriousness of his
eyes. But the secret of his successes probably lay in the fact that he
awakened in women that compassion which is so ruinous to them--so much
so that Monsalvat was quite as often the pursued as the pursuer. Two
or three times he had thought himself in love--mistakenly, as he soon
discovered; and women for their part had loved him, and with passion.
But these affairs were, after all, nothing but passing gratifications
of the instinct of playfulness--little love episodes at best.

In other respects his life might have been considered a model and an
exception. He was courteous and simple in manner, with no violent
dislikes for anyone. Kind, always ready to do a good turn, he pushed
considerateness even to extremes. He lived scrupulously within his
means. He never paid court to those in whose power it was to further
his advancement. He never indulged in petty disloyalties toward his
friends nor paid off injury with injury. His relations with people
were always sincere and free from intrigue. A useful and an honest
fellow Fernando Monsalvat might have been considered by anyone. Yet,
these several months past, he had been coming to the conclusion that
he had lived in a useless sort of way, that his life had been selfish,
mediocre, barren of any good. He was most of all ashamed of his
articles on moral and social subjects, all of them colored with "class"
prejudice, mere reflections of the conventional, insincere, and rankly
individualistic standards which pervaded the University, and which
never failed of approval from climbing politicians as well as from
the cultured _élite_. Monsalvat despised himself for having lived and
thought like any other man of his social group. What real good had he
ever accomplished? He had lived for himself alone; worked for the money
that work might bring him; written to gratify an instinct of vanity, a
desire for prominence, for applause. Now he endured a hidden torment:
he was disgusted with himself, with society, and even with life,
repenting, in his soul's secret, of so many wasted years.

To generous spirits, such moral crises are natural; moments are
sure to come when they must view their own conduct critically; and
at such junctures they loathe their sterile past. But how many ever
succeed in changing the direction of their lives? Most of us stifle
this moral unrest in the depths of our consciousness; discontented
and pessimistic, we go on living a life we hate, tempering the noble
impulses that beset our guilty consciences with considerations of
personal, even petty, interests that bid us take things as we find
them. This latter was the case with Monsalvat.

Two trifling events of his days in Paris had cast a gloom over his
outlook on life.

Convinced that he ought to put an end to his solitude, he decided to
marry; and he paid court to a girl of good family with whom he had
been on pleasantly cordial terms in Rome. But no sooner did the family
and the girl herself become aware of Monsalvat's intentions, than all
friendliness on their part vanished. An officious friend intimated to
Monsalvat--he never knew whether at the girl's own request, or that of
her parents--that his attentions were not desired.

Later, at the hotel where he was stopping, he made the acquaintance
of another fellow countrywoman. Friendship and flirtation followed.
Monsalvat became interested to the point of believing himself in love.
He made an offer of marriage and was contemptuously rejected, as though
such an idea on his part were in itself an insult. In situations of
this kind Monsalvat did not suffer so much on his own account; it was
not shame of being what he was that hurt him, but a deepening sense of
the injustice inherent in people and in things.

He had given barely a thought to the imperfection, the inequalities, of
the world he was living in. Full of his own thoughts, his own books,
his own pleasures, he had paid no attention to the cry of anguish
rising from the depths of the social order--as an established, an
immutable order he had accepted it all along.

The fact that not till he had felt them himself had he opened his eyes
to the flagrant injustices of society aroused a deep self-reproach in
Monsalvat. It seemed to him that at the bottom of his new opinions
purely selfish motives lay. On the other hand, it was to the universal,
the human aspects of his own case that he gave his attention. Besides,
does not selfishness play a little part in our striving toward the
greatest ends?

It was some six months before the scenes in the cabaret, that Fernando
Monsalvat, disheartened and disillusioned, had arrived in Buenos
Aires. At first it startled him to find himself judging people and
institutions so mercilessly. Why did he see everything in its darkest
colors? Had he become an incorrigible cynic? Eventually he came to
understand that the severe judgments he was formulating were the
natural consequence of the critical spirit now aroused within him. In
the complex motivation of the finest, noblest, most heroic gestures of
men, how many small, unconfessable impulses always have their play?

One afternoon chance revealed to him in vivid colors the degree to
which his life had been self-centered. The taxi in which he happened to
be riding came to a standstill at a turning in Lavalle Square. A crowd
was coming toward him, singing. It was a Sunday afternoon. He noticed
that all the doors of the neighborhood were closed. The singing came
nearer, swelling up from the street, rising above the tree tops. It
was an irritated, exasperated, tumultuous mob which was approaching;
and a song which both alarmed and attracted him was resounding from
hundreds of mouths, its spirit typified in the red flag waving above
the multitude. He got out of the taxi, and at that moment a bugle
sounded. The mob fell in on itself like a punctured balloon. There was
a volley of rifle shots, and in the confusion he could see the police
charging blindly with their swords. The song continued, however, for
a time; then the regimented violence of the Law was stronger than the
impulsive violence of the _Internationale_. The rabble broke into the
side streets and dispersed. The swords of the police eagerly sought out
the wretches crouching for shelter in the doorways. Other wretches were
in headlong flight, their eyes wide with terror. No one was paying any
attention to the dead or wounded. Doors and windows remained closed
and silent. To Monsalvat, sick with indignation, his soul flaming in
outrage, this very silence seemed a horrible complicity in a crime.

His transformation, however, was purely an inner one. To be sure, he
had somewhat changed his manner of living: he no longer went to his
club nor to parties; he avoided most of his former friends. But, after
all, what had he actually done these six months past? Had he perchance
even discovered the road he really wanted to take? He was ceaselessly
tormented by these questions, which plunged him for hours at a time
into inconclusive meditations.

On one point he was resolved: he would not resume his practice of
law. What need had he to earn money? To save it up? To spend it on
amusements? At any rate, he might give it away. But to whom, and how?
A friend, a successful lawyer, who had a high opinion of Monsalvat's
judicial learning, proposed making him a partner in his firm; but
Monsalvat did not accept the offer. He thought, finally, he would
prefer a clerkship in the Department of Foreign Relations, where his
seven years as consul would count, and where, too, he was already
looked upon with great favor. The Minister had promised him a post and
the appointment would be coming along almost any day.

Meanwhile he roamed the streets, gloomy and preoccupied, fleeing from
his acquaintances and the Centennial festivities of the fashionable
quarters to wander through the tenement districts and the slums.
Sometimes he would join the spectators of some street entertainment;
and as he listened to the talk of those about him, or spoke to them,
men and women, it surprised him to feel suddenly so much at home
with these poor people, so at one with them; till he remembered that
through his mother--born of laborers who had worked their way up to the
shopkeeping class--he, too, was _pueblo_, very much _pueblo_, a true
child of the proletariat.

One day he went to see the building--a small tenement--on the income
from which he was living. The house was a loathsome plague-spot in
which some fifteen wretched families lodged. How was it that it had
never before occurred to him to look this house up, he wondered,
disgusted with himself. And why had his agent never reported such
conditions? Then he remembered that he had visited the property in
person several times before his second trip to Europe; save that
then all this poverty and squalor seemed to him a natural, even an
excellent, thing! Was it not just this sort of surroundings which
pricked the ambition of these laboring people, spurred them to work
their way up to the comfort they had learned through hard experience
to appreciate? Was not this very misery the first rung on the ladder
of progress in this blessed country of opportunity, where "no one need
be poor unless he chooses to be"? Monsalvat thought with shame of his
earlier adherence to "economic liberalism," a toothless theory, surely
invented by the rich that they might continue to exploit the poor! How
much he would have given now never to have written those fine articles
of his! He went away resolved to mortgage the tenement, and put the
money into improvements which would make the building sanitary at least.

The people of his old world, his men friends especially, made fun
of his new views. He had not been talking much of his recent mental
struggles; but his aloofness, coupled with a few articles of his
giving voice to the protest within him, annoyed not a few of the
distinguished persons who had been wont to applaud him. Something had
gone wrong inside this man; and society commented on the change without
forbearance. Some said he was crazy, others thought there was something
off with his liver or his spleen. More than one of his old admirers
looked at him with a kind of fear. What was he going to do next?
Perhaps break with all established institutions.

Monsalvat, however, was nobody's enemy. Feelings of revolt could not
live long in his heart, but became transformed, soon after birth, into
a nameless anguish, a physical and moral uneasiness. He hated only
himself. His rebellion was a rebellion only against his own selfish
years.

What was it he wanted now? What was he looking for? What road was he
going to choose? He did not know. Around him he felt a great emptiness
that was ever growing greater. Wherever he went a sense of infinite
loneliness accompanied him. He spent hours pondering the future.
Meanwhile he had grown strangely sensitive emotionally; and it seemed
as though the moment had come when his outward life, as well, must
undergo its transformation.

One night idle curiosity led him to a cabaret. He knew little of this
form of diversion. The "show" entertained him; the tangos and the
orchestra stirred his emotions. This place of amusement seemed to be
a note of color in the bleak immensity of Buenos Aires. On the other
hand, he felt more alone than ever before. In all that dancing, in all
that music, he found, he scarcely knew why, the same sadness which was
in his soul. At times when the mandola wailed in a crescendo from the
depth of some vulgar popular tune--fraught with all the coarseness and
abjections of the tenements of the city--he seemed to hear in it a cry
of loneliness, despair, and bitterness rising from the dregs of life
itself.

It was on that night that his eyes first met Nacha's. They looked at
one another with surprise, and with a shade of embarrassment, as though
they knew one another. The girl lost her composure, lowered her eyes,
twisted her fingers nervously. For two hours Monsalvat lingered in
the cabaret, persisting in this flirtation. He did not understand why
he had never liked loose women; indeed, it all seemed to him rather
absurd--though the girl did have pretty eyes! Perhaps she was not what
she seemed! Perhaps she might some day love him, chance permitting.
Perhaps his loneliness would be more bearable if a woman like her were
there to sympathize with him. When she left the cabaret, he followed in
a taxi. With her companion, she went into a house. Monsalvat concluded
that she lived there. He got out of the taxi, and loitered about in the
middle of the dark street. She came out on the balcony for a moment,
casting two or three rapid glances in his direction.

A few nights later Monsalvat returned to the cabaret. He did not find
her there. His loneliness again became unbearably acute, and his
restlessness intolerable. It seemed to him more than ever imperative
that he find some purpose in life again, some clear comprehension of
his mission and destiny.

A few days later the scene in the cabaret occurred.

It was one o'clock when Monsalvat came out of the cabaret. As he
stepped out on the sidewalk the cold, waiting thief like at the door,
leapt at his throat and face. He turned up the collar of his overcoat
and walked slowly away, careless of direction, his eyes following the
sidewalk in front of him as a wheel follows a groove.

At the first street corner he paused. People were leaving theatres and
cafés, whirling away into the dark in taxis and automobiles. The trams
were crowded. The cross-streets, of unpretentious apartment houses and
second-rate shops, all darkened and asleep, were poorly lighted; but
at its southern end, the center of the capital's night life dusted the
sky with a golden sheen. Monsalvat turned in that direction, walking on
mechanically till he came out on the brilliantly illuminated avenue.
Through the immense plate glass windows of the cafés he could see
the multitudes of little tables, and topping them, hundreds of human
torsos gesticulating under thick waves of cigarette smoke, pierced with
colored lights; while through the opening and closing doors, tango
music broke in irregular surges, now strong, now weak. The street
corners were sprinkled with men stragglers or survivors from larger
groups of joy-seekers. Automobile horns, conversations in every tongue,
the bells of blocked street-cars, rent the lurid glow with resounding,
impatient clangor. But in spite of all the animation and illumination
of the theatre district, the merry-making had not the enthusiasm of the
earlier hours. Only that irreducible minimum of vitality remained, that
residue of joy-thirst, which survives evenings of revelry, clinging
tenaciously to the later hours, and scattering over the after-midnight
streets a pervading sense of weariness.

Indifferent to the animation of these glittering thoroughfares,
concentrated on his own inner misery, bewildered in the maze of
conflicting emotions within him, Monsalvat went on his way, but
walking more and more slowly now. He tried to analyze the thoughts
and sensations that were tormenting him; but the effort served only
to exasperate his distress. He had never suffered like this. All he
knew for the moment was that his heart, with an impulsiveness which
he felt certain was quite disinterested, had gone out to a girl he
saw doomed, the victim of her own will to live and of the evil nature
of others. How cowardly, futile, he had felt himself in the presence
of her helplessness and humiliation! And then something overwhelming,
imperious, had seemed to stir in his being, filling him with a courage
strangely unfamiliar to him, lifting him from his chair, and throwing
him forward against the girl's tormentors. But had he not played the
simple fool--in public? Had not even Nacha joined in the mockery as he
left the room, proving incapable of loyalty even toward the man who had
defended her? Then that final thrust of the bully: "Take a good look at
me! I am Dalmacio Arnedo! Pampa Arnedo!" In the days of his thoughtless
prosperity as a student and man of promise, Fernando had thought little
of the sister, Eugenia Monsalvat, who shared his own position in his
father's family. A touch of shame and sorrow had come to him when he
learned that she had left her--and his--mother's home--disappearing
from even that penumbra of respectability, to live as the mistress of a
man named Arnedo. So this was the man, thus crossing his path a second
time, rising before him leering and insulting, and pronouncing his own
name as a symbol of redoubled scorn for the name of Monsalvat! And that
sister, again! Had he done anything to prevent her fall, in the first
place, or to redeem her, now that she had fallen?

He was still walking slowly down the avenue of white lights when he
felt a touch on his arm. It was Hamilcar Torres, one of the most
intimate of his few intimate acquaintances.

"Give me a few moments, Monsalvat. Let's go in here, shall we?"

They entered one of the large cafés. The orchestra here, composed of
girls, was playing a languid gypsy waltz, the music and the musicians,
in combination, evoking expressions of melting languor on the faces
of the males who were assembled there, most of them, at this advanced
hour, gazing about in stupid rapture over wine glasses that were being
filled and filled again.

"It was I who sent for the police," said Torres, when they had taken
a table. He brought out the words very deliberately, marking the
syllables, and in a tone calculated to emphasize the allusion, though
his manner at once changed from a mood of reproving seriousness to one
of amusement, and bantering knowingness.

Torres was a physician; his strikingly white teeth, crisp curly
hair, eyebrows prominent over deep-set black eyes, suggested a
trace of African blood in his veins. Under a thick black mustache,
rather handsomely set against rosy, smooth-shaven cheeks, he smiled
continuously, sometimes sadly, sometimes ironically, sometimes with
affected malevolence and shrewdness.

Monsalvat did not reply. The doctor, turning sideways to the table,
crossed his long legs, and, thrusting them far beyond the limits of the
space which might reasonably be allowed to each patron of the café,
obstructed all passage near him.

"I followed along after you," he said, shifting uneasily on his chair
and turning his head so as to face Monsalvat, "because I wanted to put
you on your guard. You've got to be careful with these people, old man!
I know them--they won't stop at anything--and I saw that you ... and
the girl ... well ... er ... eh?"

His right finger pointed, on the query, to his own right eye, then
he waggled it at Monsalvat. Again his face varied from a rather
exaggerated severity to a knowing smile; and turning his head so that
it was once more in line with his body, and he had to look sideways at
Monsalvat, he added:

"No need to deny it, my boy! After all, the girl is pretty enough!
But--be careful.... When women like that get a hold of a fellow...!"

"Aren't you putting it rather strongly, Torres? I have a feeling that
this particular girl is not of just the kind that...."

"Just the kind that what?" snapped the doctor, still eyeing Fernando
sidewise, and with a mocking smile. "You don't know her!"

Then facing Monsalvat, and mustering a choleric frown for the occasion,
he added impressively in a mysterious and earnest tone of voice, as if
revealing something from a transcendental source:

"More than one man has gone to the dogs on that girl's account!"

Whereupon, with an air of philosophical indifference, he settled back
to his former comfortable position.

Monsalvat was not convinced. Nacha's gentle eyes seemed to refute the
miserable innuendos Torres was making. And yet, supposing it were all
true? What then? A wave of passionate curiosity swept over Monsalvat.
He wanted to know more. He must know more! Yet he said nothing. He
could not bring out the question that was hanging on his lips. Torres
divined what his friend was thinking, and pleased to be able to show
how intimately he knew the ins and outs of life in Buenos Aires, he
began:

"This Arnedo fellow--Pampa, as they call him--is real low-life, the
kind who wouldn't hesitate to put a bullet through your body, or forge
your name. Two or three times he has come near going to jail. And you
saw how he treats the girl! An out and out bully!"

"What's her name? Who is she?" interrupted Monsalvat, with
ill-concealed eagerness.

"She's known as Lila about town; but her real name is Ignacia
Regules--Nacha, as most people call her for short. Her mother kept
a student's boarding house--still does, for that matter. I knew her
mother ... because once...."

"Keep to Nacha, won't you?"

"I see; you want to hear all about the girl! That's the important
subject!" The doctor looked slyly at Monsalvat, enjoying the latter's
confusion at this sudden self-betrayal. "I'll tell you something
of what I know--not all, of course. I'm obliged to keep the most
interesting parts to myself. Well, this Nacha, while still living in
her mother's boarding house, fell in love with a student and ran away
with him. He kept her a couple of years or so; then he left her, and at
a very critical juncture--she was in the hospital, with a child that,
fortunately, did not live. When she came out she took a job in a store.
Probably she was willing enough to live a decent life, but the bad
example of some of her girl friends was too much for her. She began to
earn ten times more than what she got in the store--in a different way."

Torres winked as he now looked at Monsalvat.

"And how do you know all this?" the latter inquired.

"My dear fellow, that is something I don't tell."

The doctor did not wish to modify the effect of his story by simply
stating that Nacha had known a friend of his, and once, when she was
ill and Torres had been attending her, she had given him her whole
story. Torres enjoyed mystification for its own sake, and preferred,
just for the fun of it, to keep Monsalvat on edge a little longer.

And this game, for that matter, was working well. In utter distress,
Monsalvat stared fixedly, now at his friend, now at the orchestra, now
at the unknown faces about the great hall. But he did not see what was
before his eyes. His mind was filled with the image of his own sister,
abandoned to misfortune, perhaps now a common woman of the streets;
of his mother weeping her life out over her own and her daughter's
shame; of Nacha Regules, caught in the brutal clutches of Pampa Arnedo;
and finally of his own past self, happy, free to travel, flirting
with handsome women, courting literary fame, lounging at his club, or
attending fashionable parties! While he had been idling thoughtlessly
along in this relative but still gilded luxury, Eugenia Monsalvat was
falling lower and lower in the social scale! His sister! But not his
sister, only! Millions of women were enduring a misery like hers! And a
world of well-nourished, "successful" men and women went gaily on its
way, indifferent to the ceaseless suffering of these other women, proud
of its money, and its easy virtue, robbing the poor of sisters and
daughters, buying them, corrupting them, enjoying life.

"And then?" asked Monsalvat, noticing that Torres was studying him, and
eager to learn everything he could about the life of this girl, who
seemed to him at that moment to represent all the unfortunate women of
the earth in her person.

"Well, she left the store--you would never guess why! She wanted to
be 'respectable'! She took up some kind of work, I forget what; but
eventually she drifted into a café, as a waitress. Can you imagine
'respectable'--and a café waitress!"

Monsalvat, more and more irritated at his companion's flippancy,
suggested that these attempts of Nacha to work and to be "respectable"
were certainly nothing against her. She might be a good girl, after all!

"Good? Of course! These girls are all good--almost all, at least. We do
judge them harshly, I realize. If they do wrong, it is without knowing
exactly that it is wrong. And some of them really have a high moral
code--for instance...."

Torres was not smiling now. Memories of the numberless poor creatures
he had known, memories of extraordinary cases of generosity, and
loyalty, and even heroism, for the moment drove his superficial
cynicism from him.

Monsalvat was not interested however, obsessed as he was by the image
of Nacha, who seemed to be appealing to him to rescue her. And rescue
her he would! He would save her from her present tragic situation,
from fearful hours awaiting her in the future, and from the memory of
frightful hours of the past. An idea that he must see her, speak to her
again, somehow, somewhere, took possession of him. But how? And where?
And supposing he should meet her again? What would he say to her? He
did not know; but his determination was not shaken on that account. He
would see her--and save her; not for her own sake, nor because he was
himself an "unfortunate" in society; nor because she was beautiful, and
his eyes had dwelt upon her; but for love of his sister rather, for the
sake of his own real self!

"These poor girls are simply victims of conditions, I suppose,"
continued Torres. "Nacha told me once that wherever she went, in shops,
or workrooms, or business offices, the men were after her. And it's
true, isn't it? We men, even the best of us, are a bad lot. I'd like to
know how a girl who hasn't enough to eat, and who lives in the worst
sort of surroundings, can resist temptation, especially when it comes
in the form of a good-looking fellow who offers to take her out of the
hell she is living in.... No, they are not to blame...."

Meanwhile the "Merry Widow" waltz floated languidly through the thick
air of the café like a maze of shimmering diaphanous silk or impalpable
tulle. But to Monsalvat it seemed that this music was winding itself
about him, body and soul, a merciless bandage which bound him tighter
and tighter, treacherously increasing the pain it promised to soothe.
The sadness dwelling at the core of all worldly pleasures fell from
each musical phrase, each bar, each note, on the heavy air of the café.
Music in such places as this always distressed Monsalvat. Tonight his
whole being was an open wound, over which the ceaselessly moving grind
of the music grated until he wondered that he did not scream with pain.
Was his own record absolutely clean? Had he, too, not bought favors
from women--be it, indeed, with flattery and favors returned? And where
were those women now?

Had they, too, by selling themselves, lost all right to the world's
respect, the right to be treated as human beings, to be pitied?
His fault? He despised himself utterly. Only the violence of his
self-reproach gave him the strength to bear his pain.

"And then what?" he queried, rousing himself from his abstraction.

Torres, who had been silent for a time, now answered the question that
came almost mechanically from Monsalvat's lips, and told all he knew
of Nacha's history. Outstanding in her checkered career had been her
love affair with the young poet, Carlos Riga. Together they had endured
the most frightful poverty in the Argentine bohemia. Nacha had left
him finally, driven away by sheer hunger--and the thought that perhaps
her being always with him was an unjust burden on her penniless lover.
In these circumstances she'd concluded that it was no use trying to
be a "decent" girl; and she had gone off "on her own," taking up with
a man--who was soon followed by another--better able to support her.
One day the idea came into her head that exclusive devotion to any
one protector meant a sort of unfaithfulness to Riga, whom she really
adored. From that moment she gave herself up to the roving life of the
cabarets and places of amusement. It was during this time that she met
Arnedo. He found her pretty, intelligent, admired the ease of manner
she had acquired in her mother's boarding house, was impressed by the
smatterings of culture she had absorbed from Riga and other young
writers she had known in Riga's company--in short, decided that Nacha
was the jewel he was looking for--a girl he could "flash" on Capitol
sportdom, and "show off" as his "woman" among people appreciative of
such display.

"A horrible story!" exclaimed Monsalvat, gloomily. "Can there be many
girls like that?"

"Thousands of them. And I really know something about it.... I have
long been a police physician. My dissertation was on that very
subject!" And he lectured at length on the theme, sparing no details
of the traffic which has made Buenos Aires famous as a market of human
flesh.

Monsalvat could not speak meanwhile. He was thinking of his sister,
trying to picture to himself what her lot must be. He saw her in the
abandonment that followed her disgrace, struggling not to lose her grip
on life, failing, struggling again to evade the deeper degradations of
the outcast she saw below her; and finally sinking in the loathsome
mire, dragged into its depths, by a trader's claws, perhaps, tortured,
enslaved, and--who could say!--dead! He listened with speechless
intentness. "What a ghastly nightmare this world is!" He stammered at
last:

"And what is being done to remedy all this?"

"What is there to do, my dear fellow? We would have to destroy
everything and construct society anew!"

At these words Monsalvat seized his friend's arm with violence;
his eyes were moist with emotion and his voice rang with a strange
solemnity, as he said slowly:

"Exactly! Exactly! Well, everything is being destroyed, and a new
society is coming into being!"

Torres assented, as far as his facial muscles were concerned,
responding to the suggestiveness of Monsalvat's moral earnestness,
to the emotion which his friend's vision of a great and approaching
Good stirred in his own sluggish depths. He even went so far as to
nod.... Then came reaction. His inner, his real self recovered from the
momentary spell of Monsalvat's ingenuous and lyric optimism. One look
about at the café's noisy and drunken hilarity, and the man of generous
instincts disappeared, giving place again to the man of the world,
the man like any other man, stamped with all the ideas and sentiments
of his kind. To Torres the words Monsalvat had spoken, his Quixotic
theories, his grief over things that were not only irremediable
and accepted, but even sanctioned, and necessary, began to appear
ridiculous, and speaking as a doctor, trained to seek the origin of
all human abnormalities in overstrung nerves and disturbed physical or
mental equilibrium, he replied lightly and skeptically as before:

"The problem, you see, is too complex ... there is no solution
really...."

Monsalvat did not hear him. Another voice was filling his ears, a voice
from a thousand throats, convicting him of his own responsibility, too,
for the world's crimes. His heart seemed to him a mournful, hollow,
and despairing bell; his eyes saw the world as a scene ready set for
tragedy--the tragedy, first, of his mother, deceived, suffering all her
life, and handing on suffering to her children; then his sister's; then
Nacha's. In an eternal chorus of tears rose the lamentations of the
lost women of the earth, the weeping of their parents, their brothers;
the cries of the children they were driven to destroy; their own
screams of shame, and clamorings of hunger.

"Why, man, what's the matter with you?" asked Torres finally. "Hadn't
we better be going? It's three o'clock."

Monsalvat nodded and got up. He took leave of Torres at once, on the
pretext he did not feel well, and started off for the South End, toward
the _Avenida de Mayo_, where he lived.

He went to bed at once upon reaching his rooms. But he could not
sleep. He did not know why it was; but the sound of the shots that had
brought down some of the human creatures in the mob at Lavalle Square,
and the song they had sung, became interwoven with one of the cabaret
tangos he had just been hearing. This strange music haunted his ears
and drove sleep far from him. Later, when he had fallen into a kind of
half slumber, there came towards him a procession of frightful figures,
howling and groaning louder and louder as they approached; and he knew
that this procession was Humanity. It was already dawn when he began to
sleep--uneasily and for only a little while. But even this semblance
of slumber brought with it a nightmare. A monstrous phantom, covered
with gold, silks, and precious stones, its jaws those of an apocalyptic
beast, its claws, too, dripping blood, was there before him, in his
room, although scarcely contained by it. The monster approached his
bed, showing its fangs, about to devour him; and this monster, with
its charnel house of a belly, where lay countless generations of the
world's unfortunates, was Injustice.

Monsalvat got up late. He was quiet now. At last there was new life
within him. Everything had new life, new meaning. What this new life
was he could not have said. But he knew that within him there was now
a sense of clearness where before there had been nothing but confusion
and obscurity.

He breakfasted and went out, thinking, rather vaguely, that he would go
to his mother's. But, as he walked on, he turned in another direction.
Moving absent-mindedly, yielding to a new sweet sense of inner calm, he
seemed not to notice the streets along which he passed. When he came
to himself, he noted that he was within a few yards of Nacha's house.
Without hesitating, certain now that he was doing the right thing, he
went up the steps and rang the bell.

                              CHAPTER IV

Nacha had not been able to sleep. Rarely, even in her unhappy life, had
she spent so bad a night. On arriving home from the cabaret, Arnedo
had gone to bed in silence. This Indian-like taciturnity of his always
terrified her. Dread of the man's violence, fear of being once more
abandoned, and forced to return to her former precarious circumstances,
mingled with the anxieties the day had brought her. Carlos Riga, she
had only that morning learned, was dying in a hospital ward. Yet
curiously, what tortured her more than grief for her former lover or
fear for her own life, was the uneasiness aroused within her by the
memory of how she had treated that unknown man who had so chivalrously
come to her defense in the cabaret. He had been ready to risk his life
for her, and she had rewarded him with a laugh, a laugh half of fear,
half of distraction; but to him it must have seemed one of treacherous
mockery.

Into her heart that night a new, a strangely engrossing uneasiness had
come, a presentiment which she could not have explained, but which she
knew she must conceal from Arnedo as though it were a crime. It was a
sense of impending evil, an accumulation of forebodings--reminiscences
that the news of Riga's condition had brought up, memories of the
evening itself; bits of her own past; pictures, which her frightened
imagination painted, of a terrible future--a future with at best such
poor, such ill-nourished, such unsubstantial hopes--all blending into a
vague conviction that Fate had decreed some great misfortune for her.

How she longed for the relief of slumber! She would need to look fresh
and happy when she faced Arnedo the following day. This preoccupation
filled her insomnia with a sort of hectic frenzy.

To destroy all traces of the hours of torment she was enduring, she
imagined herself digging little graves for them, and burying them one
by one under a dust of forgetfulness. Meanwhile, in her desire for the
dawn, she turned on the light every few minutes to see what time it
was. Four o'clock, half-past four, five! Never had a night lasted so
long! She thought the clock must be slow, and got up to see if there
were any signs of coming day. Darkness was still unbroken. Only a faint
glow in the depths of the sky seemed to presage the possibility of
morning. How she hungered for light in that overwhelming darkness!

And meanwhile the image of the man in the cabaret haunted her. He
looked at her so strangely! No one else had ever looked at her in
just this fashion. There was not in his eyes that desire which she
saw in the eyes of other men. It was something else, something else!
Especially from the moment when all the café had turned on her! Why
had he gazed at her so persistently? A few nights before, in this same
cabaret, her eyes had met those of this man. She had not been able to
keep from looking at him; she had not been able to avoid his gaze when
he looked her way. And then he had followed her home--doubtless to find
out where she lived. She had seen him lingering there in the street and
had stepped out on the balcony for a moment.... Who was he? Did he want
to take her from Arnedo, to have her for himself? Why should he wish to
defend her when his doing so could only injure her? He was to blame,
in large measure, for Pampa's bad humor. As for Pampa, she hated him;
but she could not leave him. He had broken her spirit. He could insult
her and knock her about; but instead of turning against him, she would
become more submissive and obedient than before. Why? How strange life
was! She would never understand herself. At times it seemed as though
another being dwelt within, forcing her to do things she could not
otherwise account for. Why else, for example, should she have behaved
so meanly, so contemptibly, towards this man who had defended her; who,
clearly, was interested in her; who was, perhaps, in love with her?
Why? Why? That whole long night she had tried not to think of this
stranger; but to no avail. There was something about the way he held
himself, something in his eyes, and in the words he spoke, which set
him apart from everyone else she knew. And this distinction fascinated
her. With what spirit he had faced that hostile gang! Something was
drawing her towards him. It would frighten her to meet him again--yet
she longed for just such an encounter. Why should she want to see him?
She did not know! She refused to know!

Only the memory of the poet who had been her lover softened the pain
of that unending night. He at least was good! He was loyal! He was
compassionate! His heart knew the most beautiful words in the world
with which to console; he had developed her intelligence, taught her
to bow her head to irremediable injustice. Only this, perhaps, had
saved her from the hard, cynical desperation of other women who had,
like her, been overcome by wrong. And now he was dying. He was perhaps
already dead. She had seen a report of his illness in a newspaper the
night before; and the shock of it had left her helpless to disguise the
sadness which possessed her as she sat with the others in the cabaret.

She felt responsible in a certain way for Riga's death. Had she not
abandoned him at the very moment when he most needed her support? And
why had she behaved so? Why was there this incessant contradiction
in her life? She had run away from home at the very time when she
had become most attached to her mother and her sister. She had loved
Riga passionately, and she had fled from him. She felt sympathy and
admiration for the man in the cabaret, and she had mocked him. Why
did she always act in this unaccountable way? Then Riga took entire
possession of her thoughts, and she lived over again the time that had
elapsed between their first meeting and her tragic abandonment of him.

It was in her mother's boarding house that they had begun their
friendship. Later, after her misfortune, she learned of the poet's
difficulties. Surrounded as she was by gross, vulgar people, she
thought of him as a noble and pure spirit. Years later, when she was
working as a waitress in a café, she met him again. They saw one
another several times, compared their troubles, were touched by each
other's sufferings. So they went to live together. This union lasted
three years; and in the midst of poverty, grief and despair, they came
to adore one another. They both worked hard; but Destiny seemed bent on
sucking their blood. As their circumstances became poorer and poorer,
Riga took refuge in drink and stopped writing. She had gone hungry,
taking the bread from her own mouth to feed him, to keep him alive. But
a day came when she had no more reserves of courage. She had endured
all she could. Life and youth cried out for their rights; and she went
away, exhausted physically and morally, weeping out all the remaining
strength of her broken heart.

A little before seven o'clock, taking care not to waken Arnedo, she
got out of bed again, and tiptoed to the door of the apartment,
stepped out to the elevator and rang the bell. When the car came up
she asked for the _Patria_, the newspaper to which Arnedo subscribed.
The postman had not yet delivered the mail and Nacha sent the boy
out to get the paper. While waiting for him to come back she walked
restlessly back and forth, from the window opening on the street, to
the front door. It was a dull, oppressive, cloudy morning; the sky had
a yellowish, dirty look. The air was very damp and on the window-panes
and outside woodwork large drops of moisture hung. Nacha had a painful
presentiment. Certainly such a day could bring nothing good. Pale,
trembling, she ran to the door the moment she heard the elevator start
again.

She snatched the paper eagerly from the boy's hand, opened it and
looked frantically at the inner page. The item, alas, was there, the
news which pierced her heart, and seemed like a claw tearing at her
breast! Shrinking, scarcely able to stand upright, she went to the
sitting-room and, still clutching the newspaper, threw herself on the
sofa. Now it seemed to her that her life was indeed all spent. She
lay there a long time, weeping. This man, to whom the newspaper bade
farewell with words of affection, was Carlos Riga, the poet who was all
generosity, all goodness, the boy who had been her lover and her friend
in the best years of her life! He was the inspired dreamer who had
freed her soul from the vulgar preoccupations of her kind; he was the
idealist who had shared illusions and hopes with her; he was the man
who had never spoken to her a word that was not kind and affectionate.
No tears were enough for this loss. What though she never saw him and
could not see him? She needed to know that he was alive, so as not to
be altogether bad, so as not to become utterly unworthy. She wept. For
death, in taking Riga away, broke her last connection with the only
happy hours she had known in her life as slave and outcast.

She sat up on the sofa at last and read and re-read the _Patria's_
tribute to the dead poet. Then she went to a closet and took from it
Riga's "Poems," which she had bought before he became her lover--later
he had written in a dedication which filled the first two blank pages.
With tears in her eyes she glanced over the well-known verses, but as
some of Pampa's snores echoed through the apartment, she hastily kissed
the volume, and put it back in its hiding place, fearful lest Pampa
should appear. She must also conceal the traces of her weeping lest
Arnedo get up suddenly and see her swollen face.

She returned to the sitting-room with the idea of writing perhaps to
her sister. She heard the cook stirring about in the kitchen. A talk
with the woman might distract her. With affected cheeriness she went
out and ordered breakfast.

How afraid she was to linger in any place where she might encounter
Arnedo! But she knew that he would demand an explanation of her gloom
of the night before, of her refusal to obey his orders and dance.
She went to the dining-room, in the corner of the apartment farthest
away from the room where Pampa was sleeping. These devices seemed to
postpone for awhile the moment she dreaded. What was Pampa going to
say? He might beat her! He might drive her out of the house! What could
she look forward to? Several times she asked the maid whether _el
Señor_ was getting up. In this way she learned when he was awake, when
he asked for his breakfast, when he went to take his bath. Strange he
should not be asking for her. And this silence terrified her! Finally,
at noon, knowing that he must be nearly dressed, she tried to prepare
herself to face him; but she was restless, anxious and nervous.

She heard his step approaching the dining-room. The door opened.
Scarcely glancing at her, and without a word of greeting, from the
threshold Pampa motioned to her to come to him.

As she went into the sitting-room, Nacha felt Arnedo's piercing gaze
upon her face. She did not know where to turn her eyes. Back to a
table, his hands in his pockets, Pampa stood watching her with a hard
smile, apparently enjoying her distress.

"Well," he said at last, "I want to know what was the matter with you
last night?"

"Nothing! I was ill--I told you."

She sat down as she spoke. Pampa, paying no attention to her answer,
began to whistle a tango. Half dead with fear, Nacha had scarcely been
able to articulate the words.

"Sick, eh?"

His hard eyes swept the girl sarcastically. A long silence followed,
broken only by the jangling of some keys which Pampa was turning over
and over in one of his pockets. He pretended to smile; then suddenly,
exasperated, almost shouting, and with an ugly word, he broke out,

"Sick! Do you think you can get away with that excuse?"

Nacha, in terror, drew back towards the sofa, her knees and hands
unsteady. Stammering, half crying, she begged him not to shout so. She
had not meant to offend him!

"I've good reason to shout," he continued. "I've told you, haven't
I, that I wouldn't stand your making up to anybody! You wore that
fool face of yours last night because you think you're in love with
someone--for all I know with that mangy cur who butted in. Well, I'm
not going to be made a fool of, understand? I'm not going to support a
woman who goes around cry-babying and putting on."

"I was sick, I tell you."

"And I tell you, you weren't! If you say that again, I'll break every
bone you've got in your body!"

"Pampa! please, don't talk so loud!"

Arnedo began to pace up and down, a torrent of vituperation and curses
flowing from his lips, his eyes glittering with savage cruelty. Nacha
thought for a moment of telling him the truth, that her tears were due
to her grief for the death of a man she had loved; but she knew Arnedo
would not believe her. Besides, would not her feeling for a man she
had broken with, irritate Pampa for the very reason that he could not
understand such subtleties of emotion? It seemed safest to be silent,
to endure his insults and his anger without replying.

At last, having worked off some of his temper, Arnedo announced that he
was going out, and would not be back for lunch. Nacha followed him to
the door, submissive, and still frightened. She even drew up to him as
though expecting a caress; but Arnedo brushed her aside contemptuously
and slammed the front door behind him.

Though Nacha could not restrain an access of nervous weeping she felt,
after all, a sort of relief. The scene had "ended well" for her! Her
thoughts were free now to return to Riga. She would go to the cemetery,
and at least see where they were burying him. And she would wear black,
very simple black, so as not to attract attention! In those moments at
least she must appear worthy of the humble poet who had loved her!

She had just finished dressing when the maid announced a caller.

"Who is it?"

"A gentleman. He will not give his name."

Nacha's heart began to beat more quickly, and with an unaccountable
expectancy.

"You know very well that I don't receive calls from gentlemen.... Is he
well dressed?"

The maid nodded.

"Tell him I am not at home. Just a moment--well--yes, tell him I am not
at home!"

The maid left the room, but returned almost immediately.

"He wouldn't go, Ma'am," she reported, considerably alarmed; "He walked
right in.... He looks all right, but...."

Nacha, with some uneasiness, went into the sitting-room. To her
amazement she found herself face to face with the stranger of the
cabaret.

                               CHAPTER V

"Who are you?... What do you want?..." asked Nacha after the first
moment of astonishment.

"Who am I? Nobody in particular! Just someone who has guessed that you
are unhappy, and is anxious to help you."

"But ... you must have understood that I didn't want to see you again!
I can't receive you here. You shouldn't have come to this house. It's
hard on me! Think of the consequences! Perhaps I may lose my place
here!"

"Your place here is what you hate more than anything else in the world!"

"How do you know? I'm not so sure.... I have a quiet home--and I'm
free!"

The way the man looked at her made her break off. They were both silent
for a time, the stranger, however, not taking his eyes from Nacha for
a moment. She could see that he wanted to speak, but evidently did not
dare. At last, in a low voice and with visible emotion, he began:

"Nacha--you see I know your name--you are not telling me the truth! You
are not free!... You are suffering; and last night I saw how much! From
the moment I first saw you I have felt a tremendous pity for you."

"Oh, really?" Nacha exclaimed, with a laugh of affected irony,
calculated to put an end to the conversation with this man who had
forced his way into her house, whose presence there was compromising
to her, and who now, into the bargain, was allowing himself to express
pity for her.

"Yes, real pity!" he repeated, evidently not understanding that her
laugh was aimed at him.

"How kind of you! You must be an unusual sort of person!" Nacha said
again, laughing scornfully.

"Your life is nothing but suffering," he continued, rather as though
he were talking to himself and had not heard what Nacha said. "Here
you live in humiliation, worry, perpetual terror of what is about to
happen. That is not _living_, Nacha!"

"Call it dying if you like then. You are very amusing. I am sorry you
must go at once! But if Pampa should find you here.... I wish he would
come!"

They stood facing each other there in the middle of the room, the
stranger listening quietly while Nacha poured out her nervousness in
words, and yet more words, hurriedly, interrupting herself with her own
forced laughter, and distractedly moving her hands and arms.

"Did you think you had made a hit with me? How funny! But don't fool
yourself! I can't help laughing though, at the very idea! You're crazy.
Only crazy people act the way you do. Anyway, I love Pampa. So there!
You see what women are. He treats me badly, he despises me, he beats
me--but I wouldn't leave him for the first booby who comes along!"

By way of reply he took her hand and led her to the sofa, where
obediently she sat down. In a low voice that had in it the same ring of
sincerity and feeling as before, he went on:

"Nacha, you accept this man's ill treatment because you are afraid of
something worse. You cannot bear to think that tomorrow, or whenever he
leaves you, you will have to go from one man to another--"

"This is too much! Who gave you the right to insult me? I am a decent
woman!"

And then, finding her own words ridiculous perhaps, she began to laugh;
and the laugh, this time, seemed to reveal her scorn for herself and
her pride withal in living as she was living. The man's compassion grew.

"Why do you do it Nacha?"

"What?" she exclaimed, without checking her laughter.

"You are trying to bring together things that don't belong together.
You are trying to make yourself out a bad woman, while really you are
good."

Nacha, abruptly, became serious. She lowered her eyes and for several
seconds sat motionless, looking at the floor, seemingly preoccupied.
Finally she raised her head, and slowly turned her gaze upon this
unknown friend. The peace she found in his eyes astonished her. After a
long silence she asked him gently:

"Who are you? What is your name?"

He told her.

"Fernando Monsalvat...." she repeated, as though trying to inscribe the
syllables on her memory. Then, apparently more at ease, she added with
a smile,

"Why did you come to this house? Not to do me harm?"

"To do you good, little friend."

The girl smiled again, and again lowered her eyes, only to raise them
once more to Monsalvat's face.

"Little friend--I like those words! Will you really be my friend,
really, in your heart? It does me good to hear you speak to me that
way. You don't know what it means to me to be told I am not bad. But,
just the same, I am bad! Only I do everything I can to make people
think I am even worse than I am."

She spoke in a yet lower tone as she went on, somewhat ill at ease from
the intimacy of her confession:

"We girls have to make a show of being what we are not. It's easier
that way for us to forget our real selves: we seem to become somebody
else. I even go so far as not to blame the girl I was yesterday for all
that makes me the girl I am today."

She was silent awhile, apparently searching her memory.

"Why do you try so hard to forget?" asked Monsalvat, "Wouldn't it be
better to remember--if the present is so sad?"

"Sad? No, it isn't sad. Other people might think so. But really it
isn't. It is worse than that rather: it is empty, without any feeling
at all. We live in a sort of perpetual confusion. It's almost like not
knowing whether you're alive or not."

"But why not remember what is good in the past? Why not dream?"

"Remember?" Her expression suggested that a world full of past
sufferings had taken possession of her imagination.

"Why remember? Just to feel bad?"

"Yes, little friend, to feel, and to suffer. If you didn't suffer,
you would be horrible, all of you. It is because you suffer that you
deserve pity and sympathy; and so you ought to seek out pain, and
treasure it."

Nacha raised her hands to her face. In his own trouble, and in the
compassion Nacha aroused in him, Monsalvat began to feel a kind of
satisfaction. If she could still feel so deeply, there was hope.

"No, no!" she broke out suddenly. "We haven't the right to suffer!"

"Human beings have no greater and more sacred right."

"But don't you see that we girls must always be gay, dance, laugh: our
profession is joy, not suffering. If we're glum, we lose our jobs. If
we are not ready for gaiety and caresses, we're accused of not earning
our pay."

Her lips smiled bitterly. Monsalvat, sitting with one elbow on his
knee, and his chin resting on his hand, was looking at her as though
trying to drink in her very soul.

"We have to make ourselves over," Nacha continued, "change our natures
as well as our names. Do you think it is only out of shame, or because
of our families, that we hide our identities? No, it isn't wholly that.
Taking another name makes us seem different somehow. It's like the
Carnival. Under a disguise, you can do and say all the crazy things
that come into your head. Are you ashamed afterwards? No, because when
you take off your mask you are no longer the person who played all
those wild pranks."

"And last night"--Monsalvat asked, after a brief pause, "why were you
so unhappy?"

Through his conversation with Torres he knew the answer to this
question; yet he listened anxiously for her reply.

"There you see what comes of being out of sorts!" she said at last.
"Why should anyone go to a cabaret to gloom and whimper like a
simpleton? Pampa had a right to be angry. I couldn't help it. I had
just learned that the only real friend I ever had, the only man I ever
really loved, was dying.... And you can imagine how I feel today.
It's lucky I can be alone.... I can afford to let myself cry ... and
remember!..."

Monsalvat had started at these words. He was glad to know that Nacha
was still capable of feeling. At the same time, what she said about her
love for Riga filled him with a vague uneasiness. Interrupting, he told
her that he had known the poet.

"You knew him? Really? When? Where?"

From that moment Nacha looked upon Monsalvat as a brother. The wave of
feeling carrying her towards him reached its height. She warmly took
his hand for a moment and asked him to talk to her about Carlos Riga.
There was tenderness in her eyes now. The last vestiges of distrust had
vanished. She could have told him everything in her life, shown him
the very bottom of her soul. He had known Riga! He need offer no other
credentials to claim her friendship!

They talked a long time of the poet, whom Monsalvat had met through
Edward Iturbide. The two men had never become intimate friends; for
Monsalvat did not frequent the literary Bohemia that had known Riga
best. Nacha eagerly sang the praises of her dead friend. Never had
there lived so fine a soul, so generous a heart, so kind a spirit!
Talking of him seemed to intoxicate her. She spoke confusedly, and at
times wildly, in a jerky monologue of broken phrases. The moment came
when her eyes filled with tears and she shook with emotion.

"And to think that I, who am speaking to you like this, I left him--the
best man who ever breathed! All because I was afraid of poverty, afraid
of hunger! It's true I've suffered, Monsalvat, in the life I have been
leading: no one can know how much. But all I have been through was
nothing compared to the despair I felt when I deserted Riga...."

The poor girl began to sob with great gasps that shook her from head to
foot. Monsalvat tried to comfort her in words that astonished him, as
he uttered them, for their consoling intensity: never had he heard nor
spoken such words before. They seemed to well up from the very depths
of suffering in which the girl before him was engulfed.

"I remember so well the morning when I left him," Nacha continued,
"I shall remember it all the days God lets me live. We had a poor
little room, dark, without air, the most miserable hole in a horrible
tenement; and we had no furniture--just two wretched cots, old and
broken and dirty. I hadn't slept that night, for I was crying all the
time, going over my plans, and imagining how he would feel when he
found I had gone."

She stopped a moment to check a sob, and then went on:

"At daybreak I dressed and made a little bundle of the few rags I
owned, and all quite calmly. I wanted to put off the terrible moment as
long as I could. But at last it came. I was going to leave him--and he
loved me! It was so hard to do what I had made up my mind I must do. I
went to take a last look at him. He was still asleep. I crept up to him
on tiptoe, and kissed him, on the forehead. I don't know what happened
then: I had to lean against the wall, for it seemed as though the whole
world were falling away from me. My heart must have stopped beating. I
thought I was dying and stayed there a long time, without moving, just
stupified. When I could move I sat down on my cot and cried, then I got
up to go. Every step hurt. I went so slowly, it seemed as though years
must have passed--and at the door I looked back.--Why was I leaving
him? Why? Why?... At last I crept out into the hall, and began to run,
to run like mad, down the stairs, and out into the street...."

"You must tell me your whole life, from the time when you left your
mother's," said Monsalvat after a pause.

Nacha hesitated, unwilling for a moment to comply. At last she told
him her first tragic adventure; her love affair with one of the
young men boarding in her mother's house; his brutality towards her
when her timidity and shame placed her at his mercy; his attempts to
exploit her, and the illness that followed. She recounted her attempts
to support herself, afterwards, by honest work, the usual story of
poverty, temptation and despair.

"There was no help for me. What could I do? I struggled from week to
week; but debts, hunger, the need of clothes to put on my back, the
luxury I saw around me!... One day I told a girl who worked in the
store and was my friend that I would do whatever she advised ... and
she took me to a house she knew...."

Nacha lowered her eyes, shame-faced.

"Did you live long in this fashion?" he asked when she had lapsed into
silence.

"Six months! Then one day I couldn't stand it any longer: I left
the store; and never went back to that house. I did sewing, I made
artificial flowers; but ... I had no luck. I took any work that came
my way; but there were always back debts to pay off ... and all the
while every man who came near me made love to me. More than once I
left my job in order to get away from them.... I hated them, feared
them, loathed them. At last, after several years of this struggle, I
got a job as waitress in a café. There I was more annoyed by men than
ever; but I earned enough to be able to afford a decent room and some
furniture of my own. And there I met Riga!"

"And then?"

"After I left him? I went down again, this time for good and all. It
was then that Arnedo took me."

They were silent for a space. Nacha did not move. Wide-eyed, she sat
staring straight in front of her. What did she see? What were her
thoughts? Monsalvat, watching her with an intensity that he had never
before experienced, thought the critical moment had come.

"Nacha," he said, "you must get out of all this!"

Without looking at him, she slowly shook her head.

"But your repentance...?"

"I do not repent." The words came out slowly and deliberately, and she
turned to look straight at Monsalvat. "I did not intend any wrong. What
should I repent for?"

"But you are dissatisfied with the way you're living?"

"God knows! I have suffered frightfully. How could one help being sorry
for such an unhappy life?"

"Well then, why don't you make up your mind to leave it?"

"I want to, but I can't. It's Fate! I was destined to be a bad woman!"

All the energy of his spirit rushed to Monsalvat's lips in words
frantically shaped to arouse in Nacha the decisive will to free herself
from evil, to find good at last. He seized both her hands. Feebly she
tried to pull away from him.

"Nacha, you must change your way of living. You must be yourself!
You must cease being someone else! You must learn to live! To live,
do you hear? So as to be able to dream, to love--to remember! Your
soul wants to be free, and together we are going to free it. This is
slavery! You have been speaking of what you have already suffered.
But that is nothing to the agonies that lie in wait for you. Youth
too will leave you; and the day will come when you will be old, sick,
worn out, a human rag, falling lower and lower. At last you will be,
not only morally, but physically, a slave--The trader who is even now
awaiting you will get you into his clutches. You will become a beast of
pleasure, locked up in a house of evil; and you will have lost life,
and hope--and love, too; for love has little to do with the criminal
instincts of the men who will live on what you earn. You will be sold
like a thing, at auction. 'How much is this woman worth? So much--take
her! She is yours!' And then you will fall so low that only the dens of
the underworld, only the gutters of the slums, will be open to you; for
you will be old, your beauty eaten away.... Then finally you will die
and no one will know that you have gone. Then Nacha, you, you whom I
am speaking to now, will be tossed into the potter's field like a dead
dog."

She was in a paroxysm of weeping now, writhing under this merciless
attack, throwing back her head and tossing out her arms in tragic
appeal to him to stop.

There was a ring at the front door.

Nacha started to her feet, and tried to remove the traces of her
weeping. However, it was only the servant bringing in a letter from
Arnedo. Nacha, dazed, had not the courage to open it. She asked
Monsalvat to read it to her. Arnedo announced that he was dining that
evening with some friends. Taking the letter Nacha stood motionless and
silent, staring straight before her. When Monsalvat spoke, she neither
answered nor looked up. A tragic expression settled on her face. She
was trembling violently. Suddenly, raising her hands to her head, she
cried:

"No, no, it can't be! It is madness. Go away at once! I never want to
see you again. I was crazy. Go, I say!"

Monsalvat looked at her in amazement. He did not know what to do. Could
he have lost her? Why a moment ago it seemed.... He tried to speak, to
explain. But she pointed to the door with an obstinacy and an energy
he had not dreamed she possessed. There was nothing for it but to
obey--but this was an overwhelming catastrophe falling on his life....
His heart was breaking.... As he left the room Nacha did not even bid
him good-bye.

Arnedo's two lines had sufficed to remind her of reality, or rather
of what she believed reality to be. With a great effort she stopped
weeping and recalling scenes of the dead past. She was a different
Nacha now; she was Lila, the tango dancer, Lila, the delight of the
cabarets. For a moment, she forgot even Riga.

But, towards five o'clock, her heart triumphed over her will. Suddenly,
desperately, fearful of being late, she put on her hat, rushed to the
street, and took a taxi to the cemetery.

The services had begun. Anxious not to be noticed, she hovered on
the edge of the cluster of people gathered there. It saddened her to
see that scarcely twenty of the poet's admirers had escorted him to
his grave. When they had all gone, she drew near to the spot where
her friend's body had been laid. Her handkerchief over her eyes, she
stood there a long time, motionless, clad in black, silently weeping,
an image of Grief itself. The sky was overcast; the cold drizzle was
gradually turning to rain. As the first gusts reached the mound on
which she lingered, Nacha slowly walked away, and returned to Arnedo's
apartment.

                              CHAPTER VI

Monsalvat wondered how, after the events of the previous night and
those of the afternoon, he could bring himself to dine that evening in
Ruiz de Castro's palatial residence, in company with various worldly
persons of the latter's selection. Was he not betraying his real self,
being unfaithful to the new Monsalvat, born of his recent struggles? As
he looked about him he could think only of the contrast between Nacha's
unhappy life and that of these pretty women; and how different was the
tragic dialogue which had occurred between him and that poor child,
from the gay conversation buzzing about this aristocratic table!

Strange that contact with reality should have made him forget the
occurrences of the afternoon! At this moment he had only a vague notion
of the things he had so recently been feeling, of the things he had so
recently been doing. He knew simply that he had just been living hours
of intense spiritual excitement--an exhilaration approaching delirium,
dominated by an obsession which had severed every connection between
him and his material surroundings, and left him completely indifferent
to whatever lay outside of his own inner preoccupations.

After leaving Nacha's apartment he had wandered about the streets for
a time. Then, a little quieted, he had called at the Ministry, less to
inquire about the position promised him than to give himself something
to do. There he met Ruiz de Castro, who had a few days before invited
him to dinner, and who now insisted on his acceptance for that evening.
He did not refuse. Why should he? Was he, perhaps intending to withdraw
from society altogether? At any rate, here he was now, surrounded by
elegant women, and by fashionable men of the world.

Ruiz de Castro, a classmate of Monsalvat's, was a likable fellow. His
principal occupation was making himself agreeable to everyone, old
or young, man or woman. He was a tall man and held himself extremely
well, though his carefully nursed mustache, the height of his collars,
the variety and splendor of his cravats, the profusion of jewelry on
his fingers, left a faint suggestion of the Don Juan and of the fop in
the total impression he made. Never had anyone seen Ruiz de Castro in
clothes which did not look fresh from the tailor's; and he never failed
to wear gloves even on the most terrible of summer's days. To a small
fortune of his own he had added that of a millionaire's widow. His
principal social hobby was the giving of suppers and small receptions
to persons chosen from the most select circles of Buenos Aires. A
lawyer by profession, he had read a great deal on all sorts of subjects
and could talk entertainingly on art, and letters in particular; indeed
by virtue of this intellectual pose, he considered himself superior
to his surroundings. His guests were always men of recognized talent;
doctors, distinguished lawyers, university professors, men prominent
in politics or literature. At such intimate parties these "highbrows"
and their wives, all of whom were art enthusiasts, talked painting
and sculpture, music and verse. Of course, for this élite, nothing
done in Argentina was of any account. To Monsalvat the women seemed to
be better informed on the whole, more sensitive and discerning than
the men. Of the ten there assembled, all of them elegant, beautiful,
and witty--were they not Argentine?--one wrote with real talent,
though not for the public; another knew the art and literature of
France better than a majority of Argentine novelists of much more
serious pretentions to learning; still another, a young woman who was
seated near Monsalvat, had studied philosophy diligently and had even
attended Bergson's seminars in Paris. On this particular evening they
were discussing Rodin, Debussy, Strauss and Zuloaga whose pictures at
the Exposition had aroused general enthusiasm among the artists and
amateurs of the capital.

Monsalvat felt out of place in this atmosphere. Most of the young
women he had not met until then, though he had some acquaintance with
their husbands. His being there at all was due to Ruiz de Castro's
affection for him. De Castro, a good Argentine and a good _porteño_,
instinctively admired success; and from his law school days had been
wont to see in this young fellow, who always came out highest in
examinations, and delivered the most impressive dissertations in class,
a quite exceptional being, destined to social and public recognition.
Monsalvat, for that matter, possessed a genuine distinction of his own
in Castro's eyes. His natural and simple manners were a delight to the
more sophisticated attorney, as were his quiet and correct conduct,
his way of never calling attention to himself even by his clothes, his
manner of speaking--which was not the fruit of careful premeditation,
but the spontaneous expression of a real preference for simplicity. It
was Ruiz de Castro who had done most to draw Monsalvat towards society,
literally dragging him into the Jockey Club, and then prompting various
of his invitations to society functions; for the ambitious lawyer felt
certain that a man of Monsalvat's promise would never fail to do honor
to his sponsor; and he was ingenuously eager out of sincere friendship
to have his friend's personal worth recognized by his own particular
set.

Monsalvat, however, was too modest for the rôle assigned him: he had an
exaggerated fear of appearing ridiculous. Dread of standing awkwardly
in the limelight, of doing the wrong thing there, always made him keep
his opinions to himself, no matter how much to the point they might
have been. Timid, lacking confidence in himself and in others, he
never gave anyone a glimpse of his real nature. Only a few intimate
friends, among them the women who loved him, knew and appreciated his
qualities. For them his was a deep, a noble, a generous spirit, modest
and simple, without ambitions; a man who lived a satisfying inner life,
and possessed an unusually rich culture. For others he was a colorless
uninteresting individual, a bore and a nonentity.

The subjects touched upon in the conversation at the dinner-table
developed nothing in common between Monsalvat and his neighbors. Art
had never attracted him; and he knew little about literature. He had
read voraciously, but rarely a novel or a volume of verse, or of
literary criticism. Thus it was that when the ladies around him talked
in dithyrambic ecstasies of Chabas or Loti, the conviction that he did
not belong in these surroundings, bore in upon him not without a twinge
of shame.

Monsalvat was not then thinking, nor did he wish to think, of what
had so profoundly absorbed him during the afternoon and the preceding
evening. Nacha's final attitude towards him, the manner of his
dismissal, had deeply humiliated him, and made him long for the
seclusion of his customary mode of living. What a fool to have believed
it possible to regenerate such a woman! But his dinner-coat helped him
to forget all this, clothing him for the moment with self-importance,
and inclination toward frivolity. He put his sister, Pampa Arnedo, his
conversation with Torres, all out of his mind.

One of the only two bachelors present among all these married people,
Monsalvat had been seated between two _niñas_, "girls," as unmarried
women, of whatever age, are chivalrously called in the Argentine. The
one on his right, Elsa, was a delightful creature, blond, virginal,
with the unspoiled, however mature, freshness of her twenty-five years.
The rather angelic slenderness of her shoulders gave her something
of the ingenuously innocent appearance of Botticelli's maidens, with
which the burning roses of her cheeks and lips scarcely harmonized.
But she differed from the paintings of the early masters in not
having a line that was either angular or rigid. Roundness, indeed,
was the conspicuous trait in the lines of her figure, the slope of
her shoulders, the modelling of her cheeks and chin. She spoke with
a certain ingenuous and charming candor, turning to full account her
acquaintance with books and authors, which was remarkably varied.
Monsalvat had known her in Paris five years before, and had called
at her rooms there. He had observed with astonishment that this
Botticellian virgin had among her favorite volumes the _Satiricon_ of
Petronius, Willy's latest novels, and other productions of the same
outlook on life. Elsa's main sport was playing with men and their
foibles. Her wide blue eyes, of a surpassing beauty, gazed out at the
world in such fashion that no male could long resist their spell.
She would smile maliciously at her victim and assail him on the side
of vanity, praising his talents, or whatever claim to distinction he
might have. She would listen to the frankest allusions--provoked, of
course, by her--without a trace of embarrassment or annoyance, though
she herself always avoided improprieties in speech, indeed every word
that came from her lips seemed the very breath of youthful innocence
itself. Nevertheless there were hostile tongues to criticise Elsa. When
an unfavorable comment reached her ears she would evince a discreet
amount of alarm, and then smile to show how little importance she
attached to such matters after all. As to love and marriage she had
no illusions. How could she, when every husband who came her way, no
matter how exemplary by reputation, made love to her at the slightest
provocation? Looking at the world through _fin de siècle_ French novels
and the anecdotes of her friends, she judged it even worse than it
is, seeing in it only the play of gross or perverted instincts. Never
having felt or inspired love, she could not recognize it in the world
about her. As to her women friends, they interested her so little that
she never thought of inquiring what women were really like. In her
heart she despised them and thought them poor fools to be talking of
the love their sweethearts and husbands had for them. She "knew!" On
more than one occasion, when she had heard a husband praised for his
faithfulness, she found a way of having a few moments' conversation
alone with him; and infallibly the model of fidelity soon was a model
no more. Monsalvat had had with her several diverting and flirtatious
conversations. But now, in his present critical state of conscience,
at the awakening within him of far different desires, he could not
possibly talk with her in the same tone. The young woman on his left,
addressed as Isabel, had a lively intelligence but few physical charms.
Nevertheless she displayed a certain attractiveness that evening. She
knew how to make the most of her few good points, chief among which
were her eyes, eager, sympathetic, trusting, questioning, quick to show
embarrassment. Her face was too long, her mouth too large. Though her
teeth were not pretty, she knew how to laugh--the clear, happy laughter
of youth--and she showed them constantly. Her temperament and ideas
were the exact opposites of Elsa's. Coming from a family of the old
Spanish stock, and of devout catholicism, Isabel was always talking
"tradition"; while Elsa, from one of the newer families, typified the
modern pagan and cosmopolitan spirit of Buenos Aires. Isabel was all
prejudices and enthusiasms. She talked excitedly, with passion. She
was incapable even of suspecting the true nature of Elsa's cynical
temperament. To her the world seemed better than it is. Only unmarried
men interested her, though the idea of marrying frightened her. Some
of the world's injustices were quite beyond her ken; but she believed
that whatever they might be, one should practise resignation. For
priests, whose words on any theme were pure gospel for her, she had a
superstitious reverence; she believed them pure and saintly all.

Monsalvat and his neighbors had maintained the most trifling of
conversations. Elsa, as was her way, tried to give it a suggestion of
intimacy, to which Monsalvat did not lend himself very cordially. He
would have preferred to talk to Isabel. But was even this pious woman,
with her dogmatic education, her habit of never doubting anything,
likely to understand the complex anxieties besetting him? He reached
the conclusion that he had nothing in common with his neighbors on
either side, addressed them only when courtesy required, and directed
his attention to the plump young woman opposite him, a rather amusing
person, well-read, talkative, and critical of things and persons. At
the moment she was running on about the theatres.

"You simply can't go to the _Odéon_! At least not on subscription
nights! It's scandalous, the plays those French writers give the
public! There's never a decent character in them. What right have they
to oblige the people who really support the theatres to listen to plays
full of workmen, strikers, thieves--all the rabble! I'm sure I don't
understand why the managers present such stuff!"

Isabel, and nearly everyone else who was listening, approved the
speaker's view of the matter. Elsa looked at Monsalvat out of the
corner of her eye, and smiled at him. For his part, he felt hot
indignation against this woman who mentioned working men and thieves in
the same breath, and would have nothing to do with humanity's troubles.
A reply rose to his lips; but he was afraid of appearing ridiculous,
and kept it to himself.

"Tell her what you think--you ought to!" said Elsa.

This half mischievous encouragement seemed suddenly to re-enforce the
imperative of Monsalvat's own conscience. He felt somehow that he could
no longer avoid speaking. With a smile at the plump lady, he said in a
good-natured tone:

"But, dear madame, it is for people like you that just such plays are
given. How else could elegant and distinguished ladies of your world
know anything at all about human suffering?"

"But," said the devout Isabel, "one goes to the theatre to be amused!"

"If the show or the book is not to your liking...." Monsalvat began;
but he was interrupted by several voices, among them that of Dr.
Ercasty, who was sputtering about and exchanging knowing winks with his
neighbors at the table. Dr. Ercasty had long had his doubts about that
fellow, Monsalvat!

The plump lady's voice rose above the others:

"And why should we be bored with that sort of thing, Mr. Monsalvat? I
don't think I need to. Of course everyone is free to do as he likes. I
have my own troubles, and I believe everyone has at some time or other;
but I don't go about unloading them on everybody; so why should I be
made to listen to other people's tales of woe? Anyway, they don't ever
show us moral struggle, but just hatred, crime, and insults to society.
If there are people who are hungry, why don't they work? But I don't
care to go to the theatre to hear about things that don't interest
me, and that I can't help; and I care even less to hear myself being
blamed for all sorts of things I never heard of. The other day I saw
an impossible thing called "Élise of the Underworld." I never was more
disgusted! What on earth have we to do with that kind of women? No,
Monsalvat, you are defending ideas that I know you can't really believe
in."

Ercasty nodded congratulations to the plump lady and good humoredly
suggested that Monsalvat had better throw up the sponge in the argument.

Ercasty was a physician, though he had abandoned practice to fill an
important government position. In addition to a prominent paunch, and
forty years of experience in this world, his chief distinction was
his bland adeptness in the use of weapons little known in Argentine
society--paradox, irony, sarcasm. In spite of his smoothness, however,
Ercasty was a dangerous foe. When wounded he could fight back like a
lion at bay. Reactionary in everything, he would make no terms with
democracy, liberalism, or even individualism. "Society" was his god.
"Society" provided him with the ideas and sentiments he lived by. To
express an opinion contrary to those approved in the best society,
seemed to him a breach of good form, an offense as obnoxious as a
crime. Years before, when Monsalvat was writing for the _Patria_, the
articles which "Society" had so much applauded, wherein, with talent
and learning, he justified all the iniquities usually defended by daily
newspapers, distinguished persons, fashionable writers, and all good
Christians who interpret the teachings of Christ to the advantage of
their own worldly self-seeking, Ercasty had been a good friend of his.
Now the doctor would have enjoyed seeing him come to a violent end.

"Don't plead the cause of those people, Monsalvat, for Heaven's sake!"
exclaimed the plump lady.

"Of what people?"

"Oh, the rabble, the bad people, 'the people,' in short!"

"The sovereign people!" offered Ercasty contemptuously.

"Don't defend them!" continued the lady. "See what they tried to do
last May, just when we had a lot of very distinguished foreigners here,
ambassadors and their wives, representatives of European nobility
even! They wanted to make someone pay for their own laziness! So they
tried to cast discredit on their own country, and spoil the Centennial
celebration--a disgusting performance if ever there was one! What can
our distinguished visitors have thought? And to take advantage of such
an occasion to gain their ends! There's no name for such conduct,
Monsalvat!"

"And if I had been the government," said the doctor venomously, "I
would have taken all these gringo organizers, soap boxers, agitators
and strikers, and the bad Argentines who followed their example, stood
them in a row on the Plaza de Mayo and shot them down. That would have
been a number on the Centennial program, and example to the rabble!"

Monsalvat could listen no longer. He was quivering with indignation.
Usually serene, quiet, and incapable of hating anybody, he would at
this moment have enjoyed strangling the individual who was taunting
him so flippantly. Now he realized that all the men and women around
him were his enemies, representatives of his old out-worn ideas, of
prejudices which he had come to abhor. On their faces he could see
only insolent satisfaction with good living, a proclamation of inhuman
selfishness, a spirit of evil, hypocrisy, pride, an absence of all
human sympathy. What were their lives but one continuous lie? These
men and women had no real existence. They were insipid creatures of
something they called public opinion, thinking the thoughts of their
crowd, following the morals, the standards, the tastes, the fads of
their crowd! Their opinions were but a false semblance of opinion,
their feelings but imitations of other people's feelings, their tastes,
even their loves and their hates, mere aping pretense! Life for them
was a gigantic farce. Had any of them ever thought of living sincerely,
of seeking any meaning in all they were doing? And these people with
their accommodating philosophy, their pretentious political economy,
their hypocritical charity, were responsible for the poverty in the
world, for the misery of girls like Nacha, for the sufferings which
social injustice was heaping up on every hand! Why had he had to live
forty years before understanding this? How could he have sat at this
table a whole hour, forgetting all he had been through that afternoon?
But no! he was not sorry he had come! Henceforth he could have no
doubts as to his place in the general scheme of things: he belonged in
the front line of the attack on pride and falsehood and evil! All these
individuals around him were so many tools in the hands of Injustice;
and someone must put an end to their privileges, their ideas, their
unfeeling self-approval! At any cost, even at the cost of blood and
fire, brotherly love must be made to prevail over brute force! These
men who called themselves Christians must be taught what Christian love
really meant!

And the young ladies, the one on his left and the one on his right? To
him they seemed instruments of Wrong, monsters of selfishness, beings
without hearts. One represented the selfishness of pleasure, the other,
the selfishness of class. They could think only of themselves, of their
amusements, their clothes, their reading, their suitors, their pet
vices, or of their religious and social practices. To them the world
seemed quite satisfactory as it was; and everything could go on in the
same way to the end of time. In them there was no strong, spontaneous
desire for the happiness of others. They were innocent of any attempt
to relieve the pain of those who writhed in anguish in the world's
black depths. They were little china figures, fashioned to adorn the
society in which they lived, interested in knowing only the pleasant
aspects of life. Now and then, from a play or a book, they received
tidings of some one of life's tragedies; but always they turned away
with disgust: such things were not for their fragile and aristocratic
souls! Monsalvat was amazed at the ignorance, the unconscious cruelty
their attitude toward life brought with it; and he could not help
thinking of the outcry rising from the great city's multitudes who
might some day clamor for vengeance as well as for justice!

But at the same time Monsalvat wondered if his present views might
not perhaps be due to an attitude toward society engendered by his
illegitimacy. His enemies would say so at any rate. They would
attribute his bitterness to consciousness of his shameful birth,
suspect him of trying to avenge his mother's disgrace on society at
large. With how much truth? With none, whatever! Of that he was sure.
For beyond all such considerations, the question of justice itself
remained; and this justice, unaffected by personal wrongs, superior to
any mean satisfactions, condemned Evil as Evil, and indeed,--it could
not be otherwise--had decreed already the death of all that Monsalvat
so intensely hated.

At last, when he could no longer contain the indignation burning
within him, he began to speak; and the consternation was general.
Ruiz de Castro, who knew that his friend was an exceptionally timid
person, loath to attract any attention whatever, stared at Monsalvat in
astonishment. The doctor kept executing fidgety gestures of annoyance
and tried a number of times to interrupt. Isabel seemed to be agreeing
with Monsalvat's tirade, but refrained from committing herself since
she was unable to decide whether what she was hearing was for or
against religion. Elsa was enjoying the whole situation as if this
outburst were a new kind of lark. She sat looking at Monsalvat with
smiling delight.

What was he talking about? Of social inequalities; of the fact that
some of us have millions while others cannot buy even bread: that some
of us live in great palaces set in handsome parks; while others, in
dank, filthy, tenements, exist in a monstrous promiscuity which pens
ten and twelve human beings in one room; that some have a superfluity
of everything--property, comfort, pleasure, culture, education--and
that this superabundance does no one any good, since it does not go to
those who lack everything; that some women possess dozens of costumes
and necklaces worth thousands of dollars--every kind of luxury and
ornament--while other women have to sell their bodies, give up life,
health, their very souls, barely to clothe their nakedness, to have
just enough bread to keep alive!

"Well, why don't they work?" the plump lady who had been listening
horror-struck angrily inquired.

"Because they can't get work, madame! Because work, as things are now
organized, is another privilege which we selfishly keep for our own
purposes. I don't know how it happens that all the masses we trample on
have not risen to exterminate us!"

Indignant protests greeted this explosion. Elsa, vastly entertained,
laughed and applauded. Isabel became definitely hostile. All he was
saying she had finally concluded, was contrary to the views of the
Church Fathers. How frightful! The plump lady was quite frankly calling
Monsalvat an anarchist, an assassin, and an enemy of the established
order.

The guests had risen from the table and gathered into small groups. The
plump lady seemed determined to argue with Monsalvat. Ruiz de Castro
approached them, smiling.

"Are you two bent on rearranging the whole universe?" he asked in a
tone of conciliating banter.

"Do you know, this Monsalvat has become a dangerous anarchist!" the
woman replied.

"Yes! Nothing is so dangerous as telling the truth!" was Fernando's
rejoinder.

"But some individuals are even more dangerous than the truth--the
dreamers, I mean. Isn't that so?" Ruiz de Castro addressed the remark
to the plump lady.

"Certainly! And just consider what Monsalvat was saying about those
women! Why, he was practically blaming me for the fact that--that
they--well, you understand. Indeed you understand these matters only
too well! I believe that what is wrong with all those creatures is that
they lack the fear of God. Before giving themselves up to such a life
they ought to beg, take places as servants, go to houses of charity,
bestir themselves at any rate! There's no lack of work...! Let them do
like the men; but instead of turning into anarchists or socialists and
going about from strike to strike, they ought to submit to the will of
God, and resign themselves to their lot! As we all have to!"

"Yes, that is true," exclaimed Isabel, emphasizing the last word as if
she were impressed in advance by what she was going to say, and with
all the conviction of a person who has found a clinching argument.
"That is very, very true! Why stir up strikes? It's so wrong, so wrong!"

The plump lady added with a sigh of melancholy resignation: "Everyone
must accept his lot in life!"

"When it is yours," said Ruiz de Castro, smiling, "one can well afford
to think so. But I, instead of your lot, would choose your husband's!"

"Mine?" she exclaimed, passing over this gallantry. "But we are
almost poor! I can't say we are actually hard up; but aside from my
husband's salary as deputy, we have nothing but the rents from a few
insignificant pieces of property and a farm near Buenos Aires. Still, I
don't complain. Others have millions--Very well! I don't envy them: I
accept God's will."

Monsalvat began to wonder why he was lingering among these people, the
object of their general contempt. For that matter, he had no right to
be there. He took leave of his hosts and went away.

The night air cleared his brain; but how tired he was, how sick! As he
walked on, he began to feel in better spirits. He would have no more to
do with what he called organized Injustice. He saw now the road he must
henceforth follow. Good dwelt with the oppressed; and the only work
worthy of a man was to fight for the down-trodden. He would give his
life and the little money he had to the poor of the earth. People said
he wanted vengeance? Very well! That would be his vengeance!

It was midnight when he reached his rooms; there dissatisfaction with
himself came over him again. He took off his evening clothes, and
tossed them carelessly aside. His thoughts reverted to Nacha. Why had
she dismissed him after listening so long to him, after confiding her
own history so intimately? Could he have fallen in love with her? Was
this the explanation of his actions that evening? Oh, Nacha, Nacha!
What would he not give to see her, for even the hundredth part of a
second!

As his eye wandered about the room, he saw a letter lying on the table.
It was from his mother. She was asking him to come to her for she was
very ill, and believed death near. A few seconds later Monsalvat was
hurrying in a taxi toward Lezama Park.

                              CHAPTER VII

Monsalvat's mother had been a very pretty girl; but at sixty she
possessed not even the remnants of her earlier beauty. Aquilina Severin
had left her parents' modest shop to work at a fashionable dressmaker's
establishment on Florida Avenue. One fine day Fernando's father met her
on the street, made love to her in due form, and succeeded in winning
her. Aquilina was twenty when her son was born. Soon after this her
lover, Claudio Monsalvat, married a girl of his own social position;
which did not prevent his giving Aquilina an allowance and visiting her
from time to time. Ten years later a girl Eugenia, came into the world.
Claudio had made over a piece of property to Aquilina, but died without
bequeathing anything to his natural children. Their mother had urged
them to contest the will made wholly in favor of the legitimate family;
but Fernando, then in Europe, refused to consider such a suggestion.
His mother lived on the two hundred or so _pesos_ which were the income
from her property, until she sold it on the advice of an attorney of
the neighborhood. The proceeds of the sale were turned to good account
by various speculators; and shortly thereafter Aquilina found herself
in the street, penniless. From that time on her son supported her.

Of scant native endowments, Aquilina Severin had had little education,
and remained a stupid, incompetent woman. The comforts supplied by
Claudio represented the height of wellbeing in her eyes. She believed
herself a fine lady, deserving of the world's envy. Her parents had not
been married, and she had none of the current prejudices in favor of
legal unions. She considered love the important thing in these matters
and had for that sentiment a high regard, though the word "love" had a
very elastic scope in the usage of this unfortunate derelict.

Her daughter's education, under the circumstances, could only be
disastrous. Fernando at various times tried to take a hand in his