no, it is not to get into mischief," said the boy vehemently, and clenching the money to his breast with one hand, while he supported himself on the other. "It is to make myself a rich man, Nela, a clever man like some I know. On Sunday, if they will let me go to Villamojada, I must buy a spelling-book to learn to read, although they will not teach me here. Who cares! I will learn by myself. Do you know, Nela, they say that Don Cárlos is the son of a man who swept the streets in Madrid, and he, all by himself, learnt everything he knows."
"And so you think you can do the same, noodle."
"I believe you! If father will not take me away from these confounded mines, I will find some other way; ah! you shall see what sort of a man I am. I was never meant for that Nela. You just wait till I have collected a good sum, and then you will see—you will see how I will find a place in the town there, or take the train to Madrid, or a steamboat to carry me over to the islands out there, or get a place as a servant to some one who will let me study."
"Dear Mother of Heaven!" exclaimed Nela, opening her oyster-shell still wider and putting out her whole head. "How quiet you have kept all these sly plans."
"Do you take me for a fool? I tell you what Nela, I am in a mad rage. I cannot live like this; I shall die in the mines. Drat it all! Why, I spend my nights in crying, and my hands are all knocked to pieces and—but do not be frightened, Nela, at what I am going to say, and do not think me wicked—I would not say it to any other living soul...."
"Well?"
"I do not love father and mother—not as I ought."
"Oh! if you say such things I will never give you another real. Celipin, for God's sake, think of what you are saying."
"I cannot help it. Why, just look how we go on here. We are not human beings, we are brutes. Sometimes I almost think we are less than the mules, and I ask myself if I am in any way better than a donkey—fetching a basket of the ore and pitching it into a truck; shoving the truck up to the furnaces; stirring the mineral with a stick to wash it!—Oh dear, oh dear!" ... and the hapless boy began to sob bitterly. "Drat—drat it all! but if you spend years upon years in work like this, you are bound to go to the bad at last, your very brains turn to iron-stone.—No, I was never meant for this. I tell my father to let me go away and learn something, and he answers that we are poor, and that I am too full of fancies.—We are nothing, nothing but brutes grinding out a living day by day.—Why do you say nothing?"
But Nela did not answer—perhaps she was comparing the boy's hard lot with her own, and finding her own much the worse of the two.
"What do you want me to say?" she replied at last. "I can never be any good to any one—I am nobody. I can say nothing to you.... But do not think such wicked things—about your father I mean."
"You only say so to comfort me; but you know quite well it is true, and I do believe you are crying."
"I ... no."
"Yes, you are, I am sure."
"Every one has something to cry for," said María in a broken voice. "But it is very late, Celipin; we must go to sleep."
"No indeed, not if I know it!"
"Yes, child; go to sleep and do not think of such miserable things. Good-night."
The shell closed and all was silent.
We hear a great deal said about the hard and narrow materialism of cities, a dry rot which, amid all the splendor and pleasures of civilization, eats into the moral cohesion of society; but there is a worse and deeper disease; the parochial materialism of country villages—which ossifies millions of living beings, crushes every noble ambition in their souls and shuts them into the petty round of a mechanical existence, reducing them to the meanest animal instincts. There are many more blatant evils in the social order as, for instance, speculation, usury, the worship of mammon among men of high culture; but above all these, broods a monster which secretly and silently ruins more than all else, and that is the greed of the peasant. The covetous peasant acknowledges no moral law, has no religion, no clear notions of right and wrong; they are all inextricably mixed up in his mind with a strange compound of superstition and calculating avarice. Behind an air of hypocritical simplicity, there lies a sinister arithmetic which, for keenness and intelligibility, far transcends the methods of the best mathematicians. A peasant who has taken a fancy to hoard copper coin, and dreams of changing it presently into silver and then the silver into gold, is the most ignoble creature in creation; he is capable of every form and device of malice known to man, combined with an absence of feeling that is appalling. His soul shrinks and shrivels till it is nothing more than a minim measure. Ignorance, coarseness, and squalor complete the abominable compound and deprive it of all the means of veiling the desolation within. He can only count on his fingers, but he is capable of reducing to figures all moral sense, conscience and the soul itself.
Señana and Centeno, who, after many struggles, had contrived to earn their "morsel of bread" in the mines of Socartes, were able to make, with the added toil of their four children, a daily wage which they would have regarded as a princely fortune in the days when they wandered from fair to fair selling pots and pipkins. It should be mentioned with regard to the intellectual powers of Centeno, that his head, in the opinion of many persons, rivalled the steam-hammer in the workshops for sheer hardness; with no disparagement to that of dame Ana, his wife, who seemed to be a woman of much prudence and discrimination, and who governed her household as carefully as the wisest prince could govern his dominions. She bagged the wages, earned by her husband and children, with the best grace in the world, and they amounted to a neat little sum; and each time the money was brought home, she felt as if the very sacrament itself were being carried in, so intense was her delight at the mere sight of coin.
Señana afforded her children very little comfort in return for the fortune she was accumulating by the labor of their hands; however, as they never complained of the utter and debasing misery in which they lived, as they betrayed no wish for emancipation, nor for a breath of any nobler life worthier of intelligent beings, Señana let the days slip on. Many indeed had slipped away before her children slept in beds, and many, many more before their brawny limbs were covered with decent garments. She gave them regular and wholesome meals, following in this respect the rules most in vogue; but eating in her house was a melancholy ceremony nevertheless, a mere doling out of fodder, as it were, to human animals.
So far as mental nourishment was concerned, Señana firmly believed that her husband's erudition, acquired by much miscellaneous reading, was amply sufficient to credit the whole family with learning, and for that reason she forbore to cram the minds of her progeny even with the amount of instruction which is given in schools. The elder ones helped her, and the youngest lived free of pedagogues, buried alive for twelve hours out of every twenty-four in brutalizing toil in the mines, so that the whole family swam at large and at leisure in the vast and stagnant ocean of dulness.
The two girls, Mariuca and Pepina, were not destitute of charms, though youth and robust growth were the chief. One of them read fluently, but not the other, and, so far as knowledge of the world was concerned, it is easy to suppose that some rudimentary information, at least, was not lacking to girls who lived with a perfect chorus of nymphs of all ages and every grade of respectability—or the contrary—perpetually employed in mechanical work which left their tongues free to wag. Mariuca and Pepina were buxom and well grown, and as erect and strong as Amazons. They wore short petticoats, displaying half the calf of the leg which, as well as their broad feet, was bare, and their rough heads might have supported an architrave as stoutly as those of Caryatides. The russet dust of the iron ore which colored them from head to foot, like all in the mines, gave them the appearance of massive figures in terra-cotta.
Tanasio
