At night, after supper, the family repeated the Paternoster over their beads and then, staggering like bacchantes, and rubbing their eyes with their fists, Mariuca and Pepina went to their beds, which were snug and comfortable and covered with patchwork quilts. In a few minutes a duet of contralto snoring was heard which lasted without intermission till morning dawned. Tanasio went up to the higher regions and Celipin curled himself round on a heap of rags, not far from the basket into which Nela disappeared from sight.
The family thus being disposed of, the parents sat up for a while in the living-room, and while Centeno, seating himself with a stretch close to the little table and taking up a newspaper, made a series of grimaces to convey his bold intention of reading it, his wife took a stocking full of money out of the family chest, and after counting it and adding or taking out a few pieces, carefully restored it to its place. Then she took out sundry paper packets containing gold pieces and transferred some from one parcel to another. Meanwhile such remarks as these were made. "Mariuca's petticoat cost thirty-two reales. I gave Tanasio the six reales he had to pay. We only want eleven duros [2] to make up the five hundred."
Or, on the other hand:
"The deputies agreed."—"Yesterday a conference was held, etc...."
Señana's fingers did her sums, while her husband's forefinger passed doubtfully and waveringly along the lines, to guide his eye and mind through the labyrinth of letters. And these sentences gradually died away into monosyllables; one yawned, then the other, and at last all sunk into silence, after extinguishing the lamp by which the overseer of the mules had been cultivating his mind.
One night, when all was quiet, a creaking of baskets became audible in the kitchen. It was not perfectly dark there, for the shutters of the little window were never shut, and Celipin Centeno, who was not yet asleep, saw the topmost baskets, which were packed one inside the other, rising slowly like a gaping oyster-shell, and out of the opening peeped the nose and black eyes of Nela.
"Celipin," she said, "Celipinillo, are you asleep?" and she put a hand out.
"No, I am awake; Nela, you look like a mussel in its shell. What do you want?"
"Here, take this, it is a peseta [3] that a gentleman gave me this evening—the brother of Don Cárlos. How much have you got now? This is something like a present; now I have given you something better than coppers!"
"Give it here and thank you very much, Nela," said the boy, sitting up to reach the money. "You have given me nearly thirty-two reales now, a copper at a time. [4] I have it all safe here, inside my shirt, in the little bag you gave me. You are a real good girl."
"I do not want money for anything; but take good care of it, for if Señana were to find it, she would think you would get into some mischief with it and thrash you with the big stick."
"No, 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