“Well, you may imagine what a row there was. I thought they would march me straight off to the station-house. What a joke! Well, that is the way I live, and always shall; more dead broke to-day than yesterday, and to-morrow more so than to-day. Of course, you must know that my Portuguese friend went home; but I have found a provincial deputy in exchange, who has taken it into his head to be a dramatist; and I go with him behind the scenes, because he fancies that I know the actresses and actors intimately. And in fact I do know them. Who does not get acquainted with the whole human race in Madrid? But I don’t know what part I play at the Lara, or Eslava, or Apolo. Anyhow, at the box-office they take me for an actor. The actors think that I am a played-out actor; and meanwhile, there I am, at my ease with my provincial deputy, determined that they shall put his farce, or review, or whatever you may call it, on the stage.”
“Don’t you really know what it is?”
“No. He has tried to read it to me more than a hundred times, but up to the present I have parried the blow. We’ll see if I can continue to do so. Farewell, my saviors; my idea of committing suicide has now evaporated. Thanks!
“‘To-day the heavens and earth on me do smile,
To-day the sun reaches to my inmost heart.
To-day you gave me chops, two chops!
So, to-day, I in Providence do trust.’”
As he declaimed this, little Dumas held out to us his dirty, greasy hands, and went away.
“There you have romanticism,” murmured Luis, disdainfully, shrugging his shoulders. “What a pity that he and all the rest like him couldn’t have a course of lectures on common-senseology!”
CHAPTER XXI.
In spite of what Portal had said, I continued to study Carmen’s face and actions, and with the second sight of passion plainly perceived an aversion and dislike, growing all the while more marked and deep.
Ye dramatists, who strew daggers and poison throughout your terrifying creations; ye poets, who sing of horrible tragedies; ye novelists, who have as many murders as chapters,—tell me if there is any struggle more tremendous than that which goes on in a woman’s heart when she is united, subjected, fastened to the man whose presence is enough to make every fiber of her being quiver with aversion! And let those who believe that psychology is merely a science of facts like the positive and exact physical and natural sciences, tell us why that husband should so greatly disgust his wife. There is no sufficient cause for it. He had not wronged her by any grave fault. She is queen and mistress of her home; her husband is not unfaithful to her but, on the contrary, is very attentive to her and is devoted to his home, and the young wife waiting for him there.
Ah, it is evident that Carmen’s antipathy was irrational, and for that very reason all the stronger, deeper, and more impossible to attack and eradicate. One can fight against an adversary when he has a body, but not when he is an intangible shadow, real only in the dark recesses of our soul. There are some husbands who ill-treat their wives, who betray them, who drag them to ruin, and, notwithstanding, are still loved, or, at least, not shrunk from. Who can say precisely whence blows that breath of air called repulsion? It is not hatred. Hatred has its reasons, is based upon motives, can explain and justify itself; and if I have sometimes allowed myself to say that I hated my uncle, it is because I did not express myself with precision. It was not hatred which his wife and I felt for him, but something more invincible—a profound aversion. Hatred may turn into friendship, even into love, because, as it springs from some definite causes, other definite causes may obliterate it, but a mysterious repulsion, that antipathy which is born in the depths of our psychical being, that does not die nor become extirpated or transformed. No reasoning can conquer unreason, nor is there any logic which will avail against instinct, which acts on us like nature, directly and intuitively, by virtue of laws whose essence is, and forever will be for us, an impenetrable secret.