The Enemies of Women (Los enemigos de la mujer)

"Enough said. I came here to return your money. You refuse to take it? You refuse? Very well, I will find a way to make you. Good night, Michael!"

As a matter of fact, night had fallen, and the Prince saw her disappear in the shadows of the street whence she had come: a street dimly lighted by a single blue street lamp.

For a moment, he thought of heading her off, humble and entreating. He would never see her again: he was sure of that. But at the same time he perceived the uselessness of insisting. She wanted him to forget her; the interview had merely been to suppress all traces of the past still existing between them. And he allowed her to pass out of his sight.

From that day on, the life of the Prince lacked a purpose. Something had broken within him: his will had crumbled to dust, enveloping his senses in a sort of fog. What was to be done? Not even the narrowest of paths remained open to his initiative. Alicia hated him as though he were an enemy. It meant good-by for all time! There still remained the other man, but the Prince was invulnerable as far as Martinez was concerned.

It was enough for him to think of what had happened in Lewis' castle to lose all intention of violence. He cursed his Slavic sentimentality, so confused and incoherent, like his mother's, which prevented him from going to the end in malice, and causing him to fall, when he least expected it, into exaggerated submission. Alas, for his tears of repentance! Alas for that kiss on his adversary's hand! If he avoided returning to the Casino, it was in order not to meet Martinez and those two Captains who had witnessed the incomprehensible conclusion of the duel. He no longer had the energy to impose his will; his former harshness of character had melted with the catastrophe of his desires.

He shut himself up once again in Villa Sirena, in order not to see any one. He hated people, and at the same time he thought with a certain terror of the ill-concealed smiles that might greet his passing, and the remarks that might be exchanged behind his back.

Don Marcos was the one companion of his loneliness; and Lubimoff, who during the first few days exchanged but a few words with him, finally came to wish that he would hurry back from Monte Carlo, at nightfall, in order to hear the news, which in other days he would have considered insignificant. They entered into long conversations on what was going on in the Casino, or on the happenings of the world. It was the curiosity of a prisoner or an invalid, who takes an exaggerated interest in things, as he loses his sense of values, owing to his inability to move about in his confinement.

The Colonel was giving less and less importance to the events of daily life. All his attention had been focused on the Atlantic Coast and the opposite shores of the ocean.

"They keep on coming!" he said, after greeting the Prince. "The Americans keep on coming: a regular crusade. There are hundreds of thousands of them; there are millions. And to think that a lot of people considered the talk of sending armies from America mere bluff!"

He was really indignant at such ignorance, quite forgetting his skepticism of a few months before.

"A great country! And that fellow Wilson, what a man!"

At present he believed the American people capable of accomplishing anything they set out to do, no matter how extraordinary; but his old-fashioned ideas prevented him from feeling sustained enthusiasm for anything collective and abstract, without human physiognomy. The former partisan of absolute monarchy, preferred individuals: one man to think for the rest, and give them orders. And after a few words, his enthusiasm for the American democracy began to shrink in scope until it rested in concentrated form on the head of Wilson.

"The greatest man in the world!"

His eyes moistened with idolatrous fervor as he read the President's speeches; he exhausted all his vocabulary of superlatives in expressing his admiration for the personage who had made a great people unsheath their swords, disinterestedly, in defense of justice and liberty, and who prophesied at the same time a future of peace for mankind, with no greedy nations to menace the life of the humble and the weak.

One evening he found a new phrase to express his admiration.

"What a poet!" Lubimoff, in spite of his melancholy, began to laugh. President Wilson a poet!

Don Marcos, stammering at the laughter of his Prince, tried to explain himself. Perhaps "poet" was not just the word to express his thought accurately. But poet he would call him nevertheless, and with good reason. A poet for the Colonel was a seer, who says very beautiful things about the future of mankind; a prophet who dreams upon his heights, embracing with his glance all that the common crowd swarming below cannot see; a being who, on speaking, in whatever form he may choose, succeeds in making people who are listening blink their eyes with emotion, while a shiver runs down their spines.

His tongue became twisted as he said this but above his stammering, arose a firm unshakable conviction.

"After all, I know what I mean. For me, he is a poet: a man who has wings … very long wings."

The Prince began to laugh again. Wilson with wings! He imagined the President with his high hat, his glasses, and his kindly smile, and growing out from each shoulder of his long coat two enormous feathery triangles like those of the angels in religious paintings. What an amusing fellow the Colonel was!

Then suddenly he became thoughtful, while his features took on an expression of great seriousness.

"You are right," he said. "I can see him with wings, wings that are too long perhaps. A great thing when it comes to flying, but when one is obliged to live among men, and has to walk along on the ground!.. I am afraid he will drag his wings; I am afraid they will be stepped on some day, and that people will find them a great nuisance…"

And they dropped the subject.

The Prince wanted to break the confinement which he had voluntarily imposed upon himself. Why should he stay there at Villa Sirena, near certain people who constantly occupied his thoughts yet whom he did not wish to see? The best thing would be for him to return to Paris as soon as possible. The long range cannon was continuing to fire on the Capital; almost every week squads of German aeroplanes made night excursions about it, dropping explosives. Such a trip offered the inducement of danger and excitement to the lonely man, tormented in his perfect health by an inactive and monotonous life, which offered nothing more stimulating than the irritations to be derived from his recent experiences.

Every morning, when he got up, he formulated the same plan: "I am going to Paris." But the trip kept being put off from week to week. It was a case of abulia, the loss of will power of an invalid, who makes projects of active life, and no sooner attempts to carry them out, than he loses his strength again, and postpones them indefinitely.

The most insignificant details loomed gigantically before his diseased will. He had to go to Nice to make reservations at the Sleeping-car Office. He thought of sending Don Marcos; then refrained, considering it preferable to go himself. And days went by without his taking the short ride preliminary to his Paris trip. Both of them seemed equally long. He, who had thrice circumnavigated the globe, wearily shrunk at the thought of the slowness of travel due to the war. Just imagine sixteen hours on a train!

One afternoon, bored by his splendid gardens, – now so monotonous! – by the silence of his house, – now so deserted! – and by the increasing absent-mindedness of the Colonel, who was always having something to do either in Monte Carlo, or in the gardener's pavilion, Lubimoff started out on foot toward the City. And he met some one.

He had turned quite mechanically and without thinking in the direction of the upper boulevards, near the street in which Villa Rosa was situated. When he realized this, he decided to turn back. Just then he saw Lieutenant Martinez coming along on the opposite sidewalk, in the direction that he himself had been going a few moments before.

The soldier seemed to him taller, stronger, and as it were, surrounded by a halo of glory. His uniform was the same, frayed and old looking after some years of service; but to the Prince it seemed entirely new, even dazzling in its freshness. Everything about the Lieutenant looked magnificent and he seemed to illumine the objects about him by mere contact. His features perhaps were paler and more angular; but Michael imagined that he radiated a certain inner splendor, composed of pride and satisfaction. A sort of ethereal mask, enveloping him in astral light, made him appear handsome and gave him a new physiognomy, Apollo-like and triumphant.

They passed without speaking. The Lieutenant pretended not to see him, as Lubimoff's eyes followed him with a questioning glance. What was there that was new in this man? The Prince doubted that lack of sound health, that perilous condition which worried the doctors so much. It was all a lie made up to impress the ladies! He noticed the proud firmness of the soldier's step, the jaunty, boyish air with which he swung the rattan he used as a cane.

On losing him from sight, he could see him even more clearly. His imagination kept vividly recalling certain details over which his eyes had wandered carelessly. There was something that stood out in painful relief in his memory: a few roses, a little bunch of roses, which the soldier was wearing on his breast, between two buttons of his uniform. An officer with flowers seemed rather strange! That was what had shocked the Prince at the first glance, shocked him so violently that his whole vision had been deeply disturbed. Yes, those flowers!..

He spent the rest of the day thinking about them. As he stretched out in his bed that night, darkness clarified the maze of thoughts and doubts whirling in his brain. He could see it all in a cold clear light. "It has happened already!"

He jumped out of bed and turned on the light, pacing up and down his bedroom in a fury.

"It has happened already!"

He kept repeating the words with anguished obsession; he repented his generosity, as though it were a crime. "Why didn't I kill him?" Then in plaintive tones he would repeat his original affirmation, concluding that what had happened was irreparable. Then he put out the light again; and for a long time, in the darkness, which once more filled the bedroom, the curses of the Prince resounded, alternating with fierce exclamations of wounded pride and sobs of rage.

The following day his conviction still persisted. The childlike beauty of the morning, which always inspires optimism, meant nothing to him. How was he to know the truth about that thing which he had suspected and feared, but which he never imagined would really come to pass?

A desperate curiosity caused him to spend the entire day in Monte Carlo. He met Martinez again. The officer kept on walking, turning his glance away in order not to see him; but the Prince imagined he caught a fleeting look of generous pity in his eyes, an expression of compassion for an unfortunate and inoffensive rival. Again he was wearing flowers; doubtless different from those of the day before.

Lubimoff repeated to himself the laments of the previous night: "Yes, it had already happened." It was impossible to doubt it. But the thought of killing him did not recur, nor did he repent of his generosity. That was all so useless now! He merely thought with envy of people in the submerged classes of society, who feel the impulses of passion very simply, without any disturbing sense of honor and solemn promises. They were men who could act regardless of laws and customs. When they wanted to kill some one, they went and did so!

He saw that Martinez was thinner than ever, with a feverish look in his eyes. Oh, that indefinable something, that suggestion of youthful vanity, of triumph and satisfaction, which seemed to radiate from his features like a halo of glory!

That evening, Toledo found himself brusquely repelled by his Prince, when he tried to tell him about a letter which he had received from Paris. The Administrator of the Prince's estate was getting impatient; he was asking for a reply from his Highness in regard to the sale of Villa Sirena.

"I don't know; leave me alone. The best thing is for me to arrange the matter myself. I'll go to Nice to-morrow and see about my trip to Paris… No, not to-morrow: day after to-morrow."

He could not explain to himself why he had conceded that additional day to his idleness: it was an instinctive postponement, without any motive whatsoever. The following day, after breakfast, he regretted it; but it was already too late to find the chauffeur he had gotten the afternoon of the duel, and whom Don Marcos had just promoted to the rank of "purveyor to his Highness."

Where could he go, and be sure of not coming across the persons present so bitterly in his thoughts? Toward the end of the afternoon he went to the Casino terraces. There was an open air concert which was attracting a huge crowd. It was improbable that Martinez and the woman should show themselves in such a gathering.

It seemed as though he were living in peace times; as though he had gone back to one of those rare winters which used to attract all the wealthy people of the globe to the Riviera. Both terraces were filled with well-dressed people. The bombardment of Paris and the attacks of the German Gothas were keeping a great many elegant ladies in Monte Carlo who formerly would have felt they were losing caste if they stayed on the warm coast when winter was over.

Chairs were lacking. A large part of the audience was seated on the balustrades and steps. Around the orchestra kiosque there was a mass of pleasant colors, formed by women's hats, spring dresses, and fluttering fans. Opposite the terraces the sea stretched away between the rose-colored promontories. The far-away sails reddened by the setting sun seemed like so many flames. Across the violet surface of the Mediterranean and the crystal opalescence of the evening sky the music fell voluptuously.

Nobody was thinking about the war: that was a calamity that belonged to another world, to other skies. Even the convalescent soldiers in uniform, who were living entirely in the present moment, breathing the salt air, listening to the wail of the violins, and surrounded by gayly dressed women, did not seem to remember it. Many eyes were following the progress, along the horizon line, of a string of ships strangely painted like fabulous monsters, and escorted by several torpedo boats. But the lulling music that rang in the ears of the idlers took all significance away from the fearful disguise of the boats, and from the cautious slowness with which they were gliding along off the Shores of Pleasure.

When, after seven o'clock, the concert was over, the terraces gradually emptied. On the benches only a few couples remaining, putting off the time of parting by conversing quietly in the silence of the blue twilight.

The Prince succeeded in walking from one end to the other of the lower promenade without once having to submit to contact with the crowd.

Suddenly he stopped, with a feeling of surprise and pain, as though he had just received a blow in the breast. Down the wide steps which joined the two terraces, a couple were descending. His instinct recognized them even before he could see them clearly. It was a soldier. It was Lieutenant Martinez … and she!

Alicia was dressed in mourning, just as he had seen her near the church; but she was walking less resolutely, shrinking and timid, on finding herself on that spot which shortly before had been occupied by all her neighbors from the city.