For a long time he wandered about, absorbed in vacillations that had neither name nor plan. He hardly knew himself. His conscience had been cruelly wrung in a few hours of suffering; and from this savage convulsion of the soul unsuspected developments were emerging, enormous moral unfoldings, filled with terrifying perplexities. His despair had loosed a stupendous avalanche of problems against the bulwark of those moral principles which had been taught him as a child. And each of these questions was now a terrible problem for him. Where, he wondered, does virtue end? Where does sin commence? And if all our natural forces should go straight toward the goal of happiness, why should there be any desires that codes of formulated ethics should judge depraved and sinful? Why should not everything which pleases be allowed?
When he reached the Calle de Atocha, he met a friend of his, called Pascual Cañamares. This friend was a medical student like himself. The two young fellows greeted each other. Cañamares was on his way to San Carlos.
"Do you want to come along with me?" he asked. "I'll show you the dissecting-room."
Darlés went along with his friend. Cañamares noticed Enrique's pallor.
"You don't look a bit well this morning," said he.
"No, I didn't sleep much last night."
"Maybe you were out having a good time?"
"No. On the contrary, I cried all night."
There was such a depth of manly pain in this reply that Cañamares did not dare probe the matter any further.
The dissecting-room, cold and white, produced some very lively sensations in Darlés. Floods of sunlight fell from the tall windows, painting a wide, golden border over the tiled walls. A good many corpses lay on the marble tables, covered with blood-stained sheets; and all these bodies had shaven heads and open mouths. Their naked feet, closely joined together, produced a ghastly sensation of quietude. An indefinable odor floated in the air, a nauseating odor of dead flesh. Darlés felt a slight vertigo which forced him to close his eyes and leave the room. For more than an hour he wandered about the gravely-echoing, spacious cloisters of San Carlos. A strange sadness hovered over the building; the damp, old building which once on a time had been a convent and now had become a school—the building where the vast tedium of a science unable to free life from pain was added to the profound melancholy of a religion which thinks only of death.