Marianela 7

Marianela 7

Tanasio was a lethargic being; his want of character and ambition

verged on idiocy. Confined to the house from his earliest years,

incapable of taking any exercise, of feeling either annoyance or

pleasure, or of fulfilling any task, the boy, who was born to be a

machine, had sunk into something not superior to the roughest tool.

The day which found such a creature able to originate an idea, would

infallibly see the total subversion of the order of nature; for,

hitherto, no stone has been known to think.

 

The relation of this family to their mother was that of abject

submission on their part, and unlimited despotism on hers. The only

child who ever dared to show symptoms of rebellion was the little

one. Señana, with her narrow capacities, could not at all understand

this diabolical ambition to be something better than a stone. Was

there--did he suppose--any happier or more exemplary life than that of

a stone? She would not admit that it might be changed, even for that

of a rolling stone. Señana loved her children--but there are so many

ways of loving. She placed them above every other consideration--so

long as they submitted to work perpetually in the mines, to pour all

their earnings into one bowl, to obey her blindly, to cherish no wild

aspirations nor wish to appear in fine clothes, not to marry too

young, nor to learn any mischievous trash and cram their heads with

school-work, since "poor folks"--she would say--"must always remain

poor and behave as such, and not be wanting to jabber in the style of

the rich city folks, who were eaten up with vices and rotten with sin."

 

I have described the manners and customs which prevailed in the

Centeno's house in order that the reader may understand the life to

which Nela was doomed, a helpless, forsaken creature, alone, useless,

incapable of earning a day's wages; alike without a past and without a

future, with no right to anything on earth beyond a bare subsistence.

Señana gave her this, and firmly believed that her generosity was

nothing short of heroic. Many a time would she say, as she filled

Nela's little platter: "What a reward I am laying up for myself

hereafter in Heaven!" And she believed it as if it were Gospel. No true

light could penetrate her thick skull as to the saintly exercise of

charity; she could never have understood that a kind word, a caress, a

loving and gentle action, which may make a wretch forget his misery,

are infinitely more precious--aye, and more heroic--than the broken

meat left from a bad meal. It was but a chance that she did not give

them to the cat, who, at least, was far more kindly spoken to. Nela

never heard herself addressed as _michita_, little pet, precious

darling--nor by any other of the sweet and endearing names that were

lavished on the cat.

 

Nothing ever suggested to Nela that she was born of human beings,

like the other inhabitants of the house. She was never punished; but

she felt that this immunity arose from their contemptuous pity for

her feeble frame, and certainly not from any special esteem or care

for her person. No one had ever taught her that she had a soul ready

to bring forth good fruit if she cultivated it with care, nor that

she bore within herself, like other mortals, that spark of the divine

fire which is called human intelligence, and that this spark might be

fanned to beneficent light and flame. No one had ever told her that

her grotesque smallness included in itself the germ of every noble and

delicate sentiment, and that those tiny buds might open out to lovely

flowers, with no more cultivation than a herb that we glance at now and

again. No one had told her that she had a right, by the very sternness

of Nature in creating her, to certain tender cares which the strong can

dispense with--the healthy and those who have parents and a home; since

under the laws of Christian jurisprudence the helpless, the poor, the

orphan, and the destitute, are all alike worthy of protection.

 

On the other hand, everything combined to impress upon her, her

absolute resemblance to a rolling stone, which has not even a shape of

its own, but takes that which the waters give it or the kick of the man

that spurns it. Everything told her that her place in the house was

something below the cat, whose sleek back received the only caresses

ever bestowed on anyone, and the blackbird that hopped about its cage.

And of them, at any rate, no one said in heartless compassion: "Poor

creature! it is a pity she did not die!"

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER V.

 

LABOR AND A LANDSCAPE WITH FIGURES.

 

 

The smoke of the furnaces, which all night through were wide awake and

panting out their hot, hoarse breath, caught a silvery gleam as its

wreaths rolled into the distance; the faint smile of dawn fell upon the

remotest peaks of the mountains, and, by degrees, the hills that guard

Socartes came out of the darkness, the huge slopes of rust-colored

earth and the blackened buildings. The bell of the works rang out

shrilly its call "to work, to work," and hundreds of sleepy souls came

out of the houses, huts, hovels, holes even. Doors creaked on their

hinges; the mules came reluctantly out of the stables, making their way

to their watering-place, and the whole establishment, which had just

now looked like a city of the dead lighted up by the infernal glare of

the furnaces, came to life and began to stir its thousand arms.

 

The steam soon was seething in the boilers of the great steam-engine,

which supplied the motive power both for the workshops and the

washing-mills. The water, which performed the principal part in the

operations, began to flow through the raised conduits from which it

fell on the cylinders. Files of men and women just risen from their

beds, made their way down to the scene of labor, and at length the

cylindrical sieves began to revolve with hideous groaning; the water

rushed from one to the other, pulverizing the dark earth which tumbled

on in muddy eddies and cataracts, from trough to trough, till it

settled at last in a fine chocolate-brown powder. The sound was as of

a thousand hungry jaws chewing grit and sand; the play of light on

water and soil made it as dazzling as a kaleidoscope, and the clatter

was like some enormous hollow drum, filled with pebbles and potsherds.

It was impossible to look on without turning giddy at the incessant

whirl of a vast skein, as it were, of threads of water, some clear and

transparent, others stained red by the ferruginous clay; nor could any

human brain that was not accustomed to the spectacle, picture to itself

this mad struggle of toothed wheels which never ceased biting at each

other, of cogs, that met, and caught, and rolled away again, of screws

which, as they turned, shrieked in pitiless clamor for oil.

 

The washing was all done in the open air. The connecting belts came

humming down from the machinery sheds; other belts began to revolve,

and at the same time a rhythmical stamping was heard, a slow and awful

tramp like a giant's step, or a fearful throbbing inside mother earth.

This was the great hammer which had begun to beat; its stupendous blows

moulded the iron like a paste, and those huge wheels, and beams, which

look as if made to last forever, began to twist and writhe like the

limbs of men in torment, while the hammer, with its monotonous impact,

created new forms as strong as the rocks which are the work of ages.

For the results of labor have a strange resemblance to the results of

patience.

 

Men so black, that they look like hewn and animated coal, gathered

round the fiery objects that were taken from the forges, and seizing

them with those prolonged hands known as tongs, set to work to hammer

them. It is a strange kind of sculpture, this, which has fire for

its inspiring genius and a steam-hammer for its chisel. Wheels and

axle-trees for thousands of trucks, and the damaged portions of the

washing-machinery, were repaired here, and picks, spades and barrows

were made. At the back of the workshops saws hissed through blocks of

timber, and the iron, which had been formed for labor by fire of wood,

now cut through the sturdy fibre of trees hewn by the axe from their

native spot.

 

Meanwhile, the mules had been harnessed to long trains of trucks which

carried off the waste earth to add it to the slopes already made, or

fetched the mineral to be washed. They looked like immense reptiles,

crawling up and down to meet each other, and always passing close

but without any jar or collision. They crept into the mouths of the

tunnels, and their resemblance was really perfect to the wriggling

creatures that shelter in such damp clefts and caves; and when the

recalcitrant mules kicked and shied in the bowels of the earth, it was

easy to fancy the Saurians were fighting and screaming at each other.

In the deepest recesses of all, hundreds of men were tearing up the

earth with picks, inch by inch, to win the hidden treasure; these were

the sculptors of the strange and enormous figures which stood in awful

gravity and silence to confront the man who should venture to invade

their mysterious domain. The miners hewed down here, bored holes there,

dug farther on in one place, scraped down the wall in another, broke

up the limestone, chipped out the pretty flakes of mica and shale,

pounded down the calcareous clay, picked out the hematite and pyrites,

crushed the fine, white marble--rolling and stirring it incessantly

till it should yield zinc silicate--for zinc may be called the silver

of Europe, which, being a metal of which you cannot make saucepans,

is destined to become the fount of wealth and civilization. Is it not

on zinc that Belgium has hoisted her standard of moral and political

greatness? Aye, tin even has its epic!

 

The sky was clear and bright; the sun rose unclouded on the scene,

and the wide settlement of Socartes flashed from dark neutrality into

redness. The sculptured rocks, the heaps of ore, the hillocks of waste

soil that rose on every side like Babylonian mounds, were red; the

ground, the trucks and carts, the machinery, the water and the laborers

that gave life to Socartes. The brick-colored tone was universal, with

faint shades of difference in the earth and the houses, the metal and

the people's garments. The women at work at the washing looked like a

crowd of nymphs, come down in the world, and cast in red ironstone.

A rivulet of crimson fluid ran through the bottom conduit to join a

crimson river--you might fancy it the sweat of these toiling men and

machines, of muscles and of iron.

 

Nela stepped out of the house. Even she, though she did not work in

the mines, was faintly tinged with the universal ruddle, for the

finely-powdered metal spared no one. In her hand she held a hunch of

bread which Señana had given her for breakfast, and as she ate it she

walked on quickly, lost in thought and not lingering to amuse herself.

She had soon passed the workshops and, going up the inclined plane and

the steps before mentioned, she reached the houses of Aldeacorba. The

first of these was a handsome and stately mansion, large, well-built,

and cheerful looking, but lately restored and painted; with stone

boundary walls, decorated eaves and a broad escutcheon surrounded

by granite foliage. And the escutcheon itself would be less missed

than the climbing vine, whose long and leafy branches looked like

whiskers--growing, as whiskers do, on each side of a face, of which

the two windows served as eyes, while the escutcheon was the nose and

the long balcony the mouth, always widely grinning. And to complete

this whimsical air of personality, a beam stuck out from the balcony

intended to attach a rope to support an awning, and with this addition

the face was seen as smoking a cigar. The roof was in the shape of a

cap and in it there was a window that might represent the tassel. The

chimneys could only be the ears. It was one of those faces in which a

physiognomist reads plainly, peace of mind, ease of circumstance and a

quiet conscience.

 

In front of it was a little court-yard enclosed by a wall of adobe,

and on one side was a pretty orchard. As Nela went in she met the cows

coming out to pasture, and after exchanging a few words with their

driver--a formidable youth, about four feet high and ten years old--she

went straight up to a stout gentleman, whiskered, grey-haired and

florid, with a kind face and pleasant smile, and a half-military and

half-rustic air; he was in his shirt sleeves and braces, and his hairy arms were bared to the elbow. Before the little girl addressed him, he looked up at the house and called out: "Here is Nela, my boy!"