CHAPTER IX
The shock of his mother's death, and quite as much the story of Eugenia she had told, left Monsalvat for some days in a veritable stupor. He just let himself live on, listlessly yielding to the stream of passing hours much as water-grasses in mid-river bend and curl to the current. His mind was a blank, incapable of thinking, unresponsive alike to memory and to hope. At intervals, indeed, in some chance moment of awakened introspection, it occurred to him that this present spiritual passivity must be very like Nacha's habitual condition—a barely conscious drift down the course of events, thoughtless, will-less, purposeless.
But such spiritual torpor could not last long in a man of Monsalvat's vigor. Eventually he began to feel the need of action, and two immediate projects seemed to present themselves: he must find his sister, and he must attend to the restoration of his tenements.
One morning the broker he had commissioned to execute the mortgage announced that he had drawn up the necessary papers, and that they were ready for his signature. A bank was advancing forty thousand pesos on the security of the improved property. Monsalvat gaily hurried to announce the news to his tenants. To his surprise he saw no results of the various measures toward cleaning up which he had suggested to the janitor.
"Why didn't you carry out my orders?" he asked the latter, a lean, loose-jointed immigrant from Aragón, whose arms bobbed up and down against his enormously wide hips as he talked with a slightly Andalusian lisp that had the intention of humor in it.
"I have, sir, I have. But these people—why, sir, what can a fellow do with them? Take a look at them! Born pigs, pigs they will remain."
His labored jocularity failed, however, in quite concealing the uneasiness the man was feeling at this unexpected visit from his employer. As Monsalvat started for the door of the tenement the janitor resumed:
"Going to talk to them? What's the use? They'll only lie to you. What such folks need is the stick, I'm telling you, and not kind words, nor favors."
But brushing him aside, Monsalvat went on into one of the apartments on the ground floor, the door of which was open. In it lived an Italian, with his wife and two children. The man, a laborer on some municipal building job, was away at work. Monsalvat asked the woman if the superintendent had conveyed his orders to her.