The Dead Command

This operation was repeated when the doctor came, or when the few callers he deigned to receive were admitted. He must maintain himself "under arms" until his last moment, as he had been seen all his life.

One afternoon he called with a weak voice to his grandson who sat by a window reading a book of travel. The boy might retire. He wished to be alone. Jaime left the room, and so the grandfather was able to die in solitude, free from the torment of having to pay attention to the neatness of his appearance, with no witnesses to the grimaces and contortions of the last agony.

Febrer and his mother being left alone, the boy grew eager for independence. His imagination was filled with the adventures and voyages of which he had read in his grandfather's library and he was inspired with the deeds of his forefathers immortalized in family history. He yearned to become a mariner or a warrior, like his father and like the majority of his ancestors. His mother opposed him with an agony of dread which turned her cheeks pale and her lips blue. The last Febrer leading a life of danger far from her side! No! There had been heroes enough in the family. He must be a señor on the island, a gentleman of tranquil life who would raise a family to perpetuate the name he bore.

Jaime yielded to the prayers of his mother, that eternal invalid, in whom the slightest opposition seemed to precipitate the danger of death. Since she did not wish him to be a sea-faring man he must study for another career. He must live as did the other youths of his age with whom he mingled in the lecture halls of the Institute. At sixteen he set sail for the Peninsula. His mother wished that he should be a lawyer in order that he might disentangle the family fortune, burdened and oppressed with mortgages and other indebtedness.

The luggage with which he started was enormous—enough to furnish a house—and likewise his pocket was well lined. A Febrer must not live like any poor student! First he went to Valencia, his mother believing that city less dangerous for the young. For the next course of lectures he passed on to Barcelona, and thus several years were spent flitting from one University to another, according to the notions of the professors and their ready connivance with the students. He made no great progress in his career. He sneaked through certain courses by the cool audacity with which he talked of things of which he knew nothing, and passed examinations by some lucky chance. In others he flunked completely. His mother accepted his explanations in good faith on his return to Majorca. She consoled him, advising him not to exert himself too much over his studies, and she railed against the injustice of the times. Her implacable enemy, the Popess Juana, was right. These were no times for gentlemen; war had been declared against them; all manner of injustices were committed to keep them in the background.

Jaime enjoyed a certain popularity in the clubs and cafés of Barcelona and Valencia where he gambled. They called him "the Majorcan of the ounces," because his mother remitted his gold in gold ounces, which rolled with scandalous glitter across the green tables. Adding to the prestige given by this extravagance was his strange title of butifarra, which caused a smile in the Peninsula, yet at the same time it evoked in the imagination a picture of feudal authority, accompanied with the rights of a sovereign lord in those distant islands.

Five years passed. Jaime was now a man, but he had not yet compassed the half of his studies. His fellow-students from the island, when they came home in summer, entertained their cronies in the cafés on the Paseo del Borne with stories of Febrer's adventures in Barcelona; how he was frequently seen on the streets with luxurious women clinging to his arm; how the rude people who frequented the gambling houses showed respect for the "Majorcan of the ounces" on account of his strength and courage; they told how, one night, he had laid hands on a certain bully, lifting him off his feet in his athletic arms, and hurling him out of the window. The peaceful Majorcans, on hearing this, smiled with local pride. He was a Febrer, a genuine Febrer! The island still produced valiant youths as of old!

Good Doña Purificación, Jaime's mother, experienced grave displeasure and at the same time maternal joy on hearing that a certain scandalous woman had followed her son to the island. She understood it, and she forgave her. A youth as attractive as her Jaime! But with her dresses and her habits the young woman disturbed the tranquil customs of the city; the staid families became indignant, and, Doña Purificación, making use of intermediaries, came to an understanding with her, giving her money on the condition that she should leave the island. At other vacation times the scandal was even greater. Jaime, who had gone to Son Febrer on a hunting trip, had an affair with a pretty peasant girl and was on the point of shooting a rustic swain who pretended to her hand. His rural love adventures helped him to pass his summer exile. He was a true Febrer, like his grandfather. The poor lady had known how to deal with that ever grave and dignified father-in-law who nevertheless chucked young peasant girls under the chin without losing his sedate and lordly frigidity. In the vicinity of the estate of Son Febrer were many youths who bore the features of Don Horacio, but his wife, the Mexican lady, poetic soul, lived above such vulgarities, while, with her, harp between her knees and her eyes dilated she recited Ossian's poems. The rustic beauties with their snowy rebocillos, their hanging braids, and white hempen sandals, attracted the immaculate and lordly Febrers with an irresistible force.

When Doña Purificación complained of the long hunting excursions which her son took throughout the island, he would stay in the city and spend the day in the garden, practising shooting with a pistol. He called his mother's attention to a sack lying in the shade of an orange tree.

"Do you see that? It is a quintal of powder. I shall not stop until I have used it all up."

Mammy Antonia was afraid to peep out of her kitchen windows, and the nuns who occupied a portion of the ancient palace showed their white hoods for an instant, and then hid themselves immediately like doves frightened by the continual popping.

The garden with its battlemented enclosure, contiguous to the sea wall, rang from morning till night with the sound of the detonations. The astonished birds flew away; green lizards crept over the cracked walls hiding in the shelter of the ivy; cats leaped along the paths in terror. The trees were very old, venerable as the palace itself; centenarian oranges with twisted trunks, leaning on the support of a circle of forked sticks to hold up their ancient limbs; gigantic magnolias with more wood than leaves; unfruitful palms lifting themselves into blue space, seeking the sea which they greeted above the merlons with the fluttering plumes of their crested heads.

The sun made the bark of the trees creak, and forgotten seeds on the ground burst forth; insects buzzing across the bars of light which shot through the foliage danced like golden sparks; ripe figs loosened from the branches fell with soft patter; in the distance rose the murmur of the sea lashing the rocks at the foot of the wall. This calm was broken only by Febrer who continued firing his pistol. He had become a master shot. When he aimed at the figure sketched on the wall he lamented that it was not a man, some hated enemy whom he must needs exterminate. Bang! That ball pierced his heart! He smiled with satisfaction at seeing the bullet hole outlined on the very spot at which he had aimed. The noise of the shooting, the smoke of the powder, aroused in his imagination warlike fancies, stories of struggle and death in which he was always the victorious hero. Twenty years old and yet he had never fought a duel! He must have a fight with someone to prove his courage. It was a disgrace that he had no enemies, but he would try to make some when he returned to the Peninsula. Continuing these vagaries of his imagination, excited by the cracking detonations, he pretended an affair of honor. His adversary wounded him with the first shot and he fell. He still had his pistol in his hand; he must defend himself while stretched on the ground; and to the great scandal of his mother and of Mammy Antonia who thought him crazy as they peeped out of the window, he continued lying face downward shooting in this position, preparing for the time when he should be wounded.

When he returned to the Peninsula to continue his interminable studies, he went refreshed by the country life, sure of himself after his practice in the garden and eager to have the longed for duel with the first man who should give him the slightest pretext. But as he was a courteous person, incapable of unjust provocation, with manners that inspired respect from the insolent, time passed and the duel did not take place. His exuberant vitality, his impulsive strength, were consumed in dark adventures, of which his fellow students afterward told on the island with admiration.

While in Barcelona he received a telegram announcing that his mother was seriously ill. He was delayed two days before sailing; there was no boat ready. When he reached the island his mother was dead. Of the ancient family which he had seen in his childhood none remained. Only Mammy Antonia could recall the past.

Jaime was twenty-three when he found himself master of the Febrer fortune, and in absolute liberty. The fortune had been diminished by the ostentation of his ancestors and burdened with encumbrances. The Febrer house was big. It was like vessels which when wrecked and lost forever enrich the coast where they are dashed to pieces. The remains and spoils, upon which his ancestors would have looked with scorn, still represented a fortune. Jaime did not wish to think. He did not wish to know. He must live; he must see the world! So he gave up his studies. What need had he for law, and for Roman customs, and for ecclesiastical canons, in order to lead a gay existence? He knew enough. In reality, the most delightful of his accomplishments he owed to his mother. When he was a child still living in the palace, before he had ever seen a schoolmaster, she had taught him something of French and had given him a little instruction on an ancient piano with yellow keys and a great red silk reredos almost touching the ceiling. Others knew less than he, and yet they were just as gentlemanly and they were much happier. Now for life! He stayed two years in Madrid; where he affected mistresses who gave him a certain notoriety, and drove famous horses. He became the intimate friend of a celebrated bull-fighter, and he gambled heavily in the clubs on Alcalá Street. He fought a duel, but with swords, instead of lying on the ground, pistol in hand, as he had formerly pictured to himself, and he came out of the affair with a scratch on his arm, something in the nature of a pin prick in the epidermis of an elephant. He was no longer "the Majorcan with the ounces." The hoard of round gold pieces treasured by his mother had vanished. He now flung bank bills prodigally upon the gaming tables, and when bad luck assailed him he wrote to his administrator, a lawyer, the scion of a family of old time mossons, retainers of the Febrers during many centuries.

Jaime wearied of Madrid, where he felt himself essentially a stranger. The soul of the ancient Febrers lingered within him—those travelers through all countries except Spain, for they had ever lived with their backs turned upon their sovereigns. Many of his ancestors were familiar with every one of the important Mediterranean cities, they had visited the princes of the small Italian states, they had been received in audience by the Pope and by the Grand Turk, but never had it occurred to them to visit Madrid. Moreover, Febrer was often irritated with his relatives in the court city—youths proud of their noble titles who smiled at his odd appellation of butifarra. With what indifference his family had allowed various marquisates to descend to relatives on the Peninsula while they clung to their supreme title of island nobility and the high knightly rank of Malta!

He began to run over Europe, fixing his residence in the autumn and during part of the winter in Paris; spending the cold months on the Blue Coast; spring in London; summer in Ostend; with various trips to Italy, Egypt, and Norway to see the midnight sun. In this new existence he was barely known. He was one traveler more, an insignificant circulating globule in the great arterial network which desire for travel extends over the Continent; but this life of continual movement, of tedious monotony, and unexpected adventures, satisfied his hereditary instinct, the inclinations transmitted from his remote ancestors, constant visitors among new peoples. This wandering existence, also, satiated his longing for the extraordinary. In the hotels at Nice, phalansteries of the most polite and hypocritical worldly corruption, he had been flattered in the seclusion of his room by unexpected visits. In Egypt he had been compelled to flee from the caresses of a decadent Hungarian countess, a withered flower of elegance, with moist eyes and violent perfume.

He passed his twenty-eighth birthday in Munich. A short time before he had gone to Bayreuth to hear the Wagnerian operas, and now in the capital of Bavaria he attended the theater of the Residence, where the Mozart festival was celebrated. Jaime was not a melomaniac, but his vagrant existence forced him with the crowd, and his accomplishment as an amateur pianist had led him to make his musical pilgrimage for two consecutive years.

In the hotel in Munich he met Miss Mary Gordon, whom he had seen before at the Wagner theater. She was an English girl, tall, slender, with firm flesh and the body of a gymnast which exercise had developed into agreeable feminine curves, giving her a youthful figure, and the wholesome, asexual appearance of a handsome boy. Her beautiful head was that of a court page, with skin as transparent as porcelain, pink nostrils like those of a toy dog, deep blue eyes and blonde hair, pale gold on the surface and dark gold beneath. Her beauty was adorable but fragile; that British beauty which is lost at thirty beneath purplish flushes and blotches on the skin.

In the restaurant Jaime had several times surprised the gaze of her blue eyes, frankly, tranquilly bold, fixed upon him. She was attended by a fat, spongy woman with rouged cheeks, a traveling companion dressed in black with a red straw hat and a broad belt of the same color, which divided the bulky hemispheres of her breast and abdomen. Young and graceful, Mary Gordon resembled a flower of gold and nacre in her white flannel suits of masculine cut with a mannish cravat, and a Panama with drooping brim around which she wound a blue veil.

Febrer met the pair at every turn; in the picture gallery, standing before Durer's Evangelists; in the hall of sculpture examining Egina's marbles; in the rococo theater of the Residence, where Mozart was sung, an audience hall of a former century, with decorations of porcelain and garlands which seemed to require that the spectators wear the purple heel and the white wig. Accustomed to meeting each other, Jaime greeted her with a smile and she seemed to answer timidly with the flash of her eyes.

One morning, on coming out of his room, he met the English girl on a landing of the stairway. She was bending her boyish breast over the balustrade.

"Lift! Lift!" she called with her birdlike voice, summoning the elevator man to bring it up.

Febrer bowed as he entered the movable cage with her, and said a few words in French to start a conversation. The English girl stared at him in silence with her light blue eyes in which a star of gold seemed to be floating. She remained silent as if she did not understand, yet Jaime had seen her in the reading room turning the leaves of the Parisian dailies.

Stepping out of the elevator she turned with hasty step toward the office where sat the hotel clerk, pen in hand. He listened with obsequious mien, like a polyglot quick to understand each of his guests, and coming out from his enclosure he made straight toward Jaime, who, still embarrassed by his unsuccessful venture, was pretending to read the advertisements in the vestibule. Febrer at first did not realize that it was he who was being addressed.

"Señor, this lady asks me to introduce you to her," said the clerk.

Turning toward the English girl he added with Teutonic composure, like one fulfilling a duty, "Monsieur the hidalgo Febrer, Marquis of Spain."

He understood the part he was playing. Everyone who travels with good valises is an hidalgo and a marquis until the contrary be proven.

Then, with his eyes, he indicated the English girl who stood stiff and grave during the ceremony without which no well-bred woman may exchange a word with a man: "Miss Gordon, doctor of the University of Melbourne."

The young lady extended her white gloved hand and shook Febrer's with gymnastic vigor. Not till then did she venture to speak:

"Oh, Spain! Oh, 'Don Quixote'!"

Unconsciously they strolled out of the hotel together discussing the afternoon performances which they had attended. There was to be no function at the theaters that day and she was thinking of going to the park called Theresienwiese, at the foot of the statue of Bavaria, to see the Tyrolese fair and to listen to the folk-songs. After breakfasting at the hotel they went to the fair grounds; they climbed upon an enormous statue and viewed the Bavarian plain, its lakes and its distant mountains; they explored the Memorial Hall, filled with busts of celebrated Bavarians, most of whose names they read for the first time, and they finished by going from booth to booth, admiring the costumes of the Tyrolese, their gymnastic dances, their birdlike warbling and trilling.

They went about as if they had known each other all their lives, Jaime admiring the masculine liberty of Saxon girls who are not afraid of associating with men and who feel strong in their ability to take care of themselves. From that day they visited together museums, academies, old churches, sometimes alone, and again with the companion, who made strenuous exertions to keep pace with them. They were comrades who communicated their impressions without thinking of difference of sex. Jaime was disposed to take advantage of this intimacy by making gallant speeches, by risking little advances, but he restrained himself. With women like this action might be dangerous, they remain impassive, proof against all manner of impressions. He must wait until she should take the initiative. These were women who could go alone around the world, likely to interrupt passionate advances with the blows of a trained boxer. He had seen some in his travels who carried diminutive nickel-plated revolvers in their muffs or in their handbags along with powder box and handkerchief.

Mary Gordon told of the distant Oceanic archipelago in which her father exercised authority like a viceroy. She had no mother, and she had come to Europe to complete studies begun in Australia. She held the degree of Doctor from the University of Melbourne; a doctor of music. Jaime, suppressing his astonishment at this news from a distant world, told of himself, of his family, of his native land, of the curiosities of the island, of the cavern of Arta, tragically grand, chaotic as an ante-chamber of the inferno; of the Dragon's caves with their forests of stalactites, glistening like an ice palace, of its thousand placid lakes, from the deep crystal depths of which it seemed as if nude sirens would arise like those Rhine maidens who guarded the treasure of the Niebelungs. Mary listened to him, entranced. Jaime seemed to grow greater before her eyes, as she learned that he was a son of that isle of dreams, where the sea is always blue, where the sun is ever shining, and where blooms the orange flower.

Febrer began to spend his afternoons in the room of the English girl. The performances of the Mozart festival were ended. Miss Gordon needed daily the spiritual uplift of music. She had a piano in her reception room, and a roll of opera scores which accompanied her on her travels. Jaime sat near, before the keyboard, trying to accompany the pieces she was interpreting, ever those of the same author, the god, the only! The hotel was near the station, and the noise of drays, carriages and street cars annoyed the English woman and she closed the windows. Her stout companion had gone to her own apartment, rejoiced at being free from that musical tempest, the delights of which could not compare with those of making a good bit of Irish point lace. Miss Gordon, alone with the Spaniard, treated him as if she were a master.

"Come, do that again; let us repeat the theme of the sword. Pay attention!"

But Jaime was distracted, peeping out of the corner of his eye at the girl's long, white neck bristling with little golden locks, at the network of blue veins delicately outlined beneath the transparency of her pearly skin.

One afternoon it rained; the leaden sky seemed to graze the roofs of the houses; in the reception room there was the diffused light of a cellar. They were playing almost in the dark, bending their heads forward to read the score. Forth rolled the music of the forest of enchantments, moving its green and whispering tree tops before the rude Siegfried, the innocent child of Nature, eager to know the language of the soul and of inanimate things. The master-bird sang, his voice rising above the murmur of the foliage. Mary was trembling with excitement.

"Ah, poet! Poet!"

She continued playing. Then, in the growing darkness of the room, sounded the strong chords which accompanied the hero to the tomb; the funeral march of the warriors bearing upon the shield the muscular body of Siegfried, with his golden hair, interrupting the melancholy phrase of the God of gods. Mary continued trembling, until suddenly her hands fell from the keyboard and her head rested on Jaime's shoulder, like a bird folding its wings.

"Oh, Richard!… Richard, mon bien aimée!"

The Spaniard saw her wandering eyes and her tremulous lips offering themselves to him; in his grasp he felt her cold hands; her breath floated about him. Against his bosom were pressed hidden curves of firm elastic plumpness, the existence of which he had not suspected.

There was no more music that afternoon.

At midnight when Febrer retired, he had not yet recovered from his astonishment. After so many fears, this was the way things had happened, with the greatest simplicity, as one is offered a hand, without exertion on his part.

Another surprise had been to hear himself called by a name which was not his. Who could that Richard be? But in the hour of sweet and dreamy explanations which follow those of madness and forgetfulness, she had told him of the impression she had received in Bayreuth when she saw him for the first time among the thousand heads which filled the theater. It was he, the great musician, as he was portrayed in his youthful pictures! When she met him again in Munich beneath the same roof, she had felt that the die was cast and that it was useless to resist this attraction.

Febrer examined himself with ironical curiosity in the mirror in his room. What ideas a woman is capable of conceiving! Yes, he was something like that other one—the heavy forehead, the drooping hair, the beaked nose, and the prominent chin, which, in years to come would turn inward, seeking each other, and give him a certain witchlike profile.... Excellent and glorious Richard! By what miracle had Wagner brought to him one of the greatest joys of his existence! What an original woman was this!

Astonishment, mingled with a shade of annoyance, grew upon Febrer as the days passed. She seemed to forget what had taken place, and to grow constantly more unapproachable. She received him with grave rigidity, as if nothing had occurred, as if the past had left no trace upon her mind, as if the day before had never been. Only when music evoked the memory of the other man came tenderness and submission.

Jaime was irritated, and he determined to dominate her; he would prove himself a man! At last he triumphed to such an extent that the piano was heard less and she began to see in him something more than a living picture of her idol.

In their happy intoxication Munich and the hotel in which they had seen each other as strangers seemed to them offensive. They felt the need of flying far away, where they could make love freely, and one day they found themselves in a port which had a stone lion at its entrance, while beyond spread the liquid surface of an immense lake which mingled with the sky on the horizon. They were in Lindau. One steamer could convey them to Switzerland, another to Constance, but they preferred the tranquil German city of the famous Ecumenical Council, establishing themselves in the Island Hotel, an ancient Dominican Monastery.