Their Son; The Necklace

by Eduardo Zamacois

As he went down the stairs, very sadly, that idea of his own inferiority which had wounded him on the night he had been introduced to Alicia once more overcame him. Yes, he was beaten at the start. He was inept and worthless. What could he offer her? Not money, since he was poor; nor fame, since he was not a noted artist; nor yet could he bring her gayety and joy, for whatever of these he had until now possessed in his sentimental, introspective soul, had been taken away from him by Alicia's indifference.

Many days, at nightfall, the student went to Calle Mayor and stood in front of the jeweler's window where he could see the sparkling of that magnificent emerald necklace that Alicia had told him about. Now he would walk up and down the street, wrapped in his cloak with a certain worldly aplomb; now he would pause to look at the shop, whose electric lights flooded the passers-by under a rain of brilliancy. He would stand a long time in front of the window, enthralled by the spell of the bleeding rubies, the topazes which burned like wounds, the celestial blue turquoises. He would stare at the chains and rings, shimmering with gold on the artistically-wrinkled, black velvet, which finely carpeted the broad reach of the window. And this vagrant attraction, wakened in him by the jewels, seemed to cause a kind of presentiment. All the time, his immature mind would be thinking:

"Alicia would be happy if she should pass along, now, and see me here."

During those first days of separation, the memory of the beloved one rooted itself into the student's memory under the strange sensation of violet perfume. He either did not remember, or he pretended not to remember, the big, green eyes of the girl, her cruel and epigrammatic little mouth, her firm, white body. But all the more did that violet perfume possess him. He seemed to find his clothes, his hands, his text-books, his poor little bed all odorous of violets. Still, even this sweet illusion began to fade. Time began to blur it out, as it had blurred his recollections of the girl. Darlés wept a great deal. And one night he wrote her a desperate, somewhat enigmatic note:

"I'm going to see you, to-morrow. If you won't let me in, I shall die. Be merciful! My little room no longer smells of violets."

Alicia felt annoyed by the student's note. What was the idea of these ostentatious hyperboles of passion? Could Darlés have got it into his head that what had happened—one of many adventures in her path—had been anything but perfectly worthless and common? Alicia felt so sure of this that her emotion was one of astonishment, more than of disgust. Yet, in the beginning, her surprise caused her a certain pleasure.

"It really would be interesting," thought she, "if this boy should fall in love with me like the hero of a play."

But the pleasure of such a curiosity hardly lasted a minute. Soon the girl's cold, selfish spirit, that always traveled in straight lines toward its own ends—the spirit and the will that never let themselves be interfered with—reacted against this romantic possibility. Alicia neither wanted to love nor be loved. For through the experiences of her girl friends she had learned that love, with all its jealousies and pains, is harshly cruel to lover and beloved, alike.

She attached no importance whatever to the caprice that had momentarily thrown her into the student's arms. The evening before their first and only night together, Darlés had just happened to find her in one of those fits of the blues, of eclectic relaxation, in which the volatile feminine sense of ethics swings equidistant from good and evil. Her virtues and her vices, alike, were arbitrary and without any exact motive. If the student had perhaps had finer eyes, she would have yielded to him, just the same; then too, perhaps if the emerald necklace that, just a few minutes before, she and Don Manuel had been quarreling about had been less desirable, she would have refused him.

The only certain thing about it all was this, that she had accepted the student's comradeship because in a kind of good-natured way she had reckoned the conversation of even a poor man more entertaining than the remembrance of a necklace. And next morning when she had got back home, she had found herself a little surprised at her own conduct. She felt that she had shown a generosity, a fanciful whim such as perhaps might have driven a critic like Sarcey, after forty years of the real theater, to some miserable little puppet-show. At all events the thing should never happen again. It was absurd!