The Fencing Master Read Online Free Page B

while he stirred his coffee with his spoon. Romero pulled himself from his melancholy daydreams to plead for moderation, and tried, without success, to bring the conversation around to music.
    "Don't change the subject," said Cárceles.
    "I'm not," protested Romero. "Music has a social content too, you know. It creates equality in the sphere of the arts, it breaks down frontiers, it brings people together..."
    "The only music this gentleman enjoys is the battle hymn of the Liberals."
    "Now don't start, Don Lucas."
    The cat thought it spotted a mouse and lunged past their legs after it. Carreño had dipped his finger in his glass of water and was drawing a mysterious sign on the worn marble tabletop. "So-and-so's in Valencia and you-know-who is in Valladolid. They say that Topete in Cádiz has received emissaries, but who knows. And Prim will be here any day now. This time there's really going to be trouble." And, keeping details to an enigmatic minimum, he started describing the plot of the moment, which—he had it on good authority, gentlemen—was being hatched, he was reliably informed, thanks to certain confidences vouchsafed to him by the relevant people in his lodge, whose names he preferred not to reveal. That the plot he mentioned was, like a half-dozen others, public knowledge did not diminish his enthusiasm one iota. In a low voice, looking furtively about, using hints and taking other precautions, Carreño set out the details of the enterprise, in which (I trust in your discretion, gentlemen) he was pretty much up to his neck. The lodges—he referred to the lodges as others spoke of their relatives—were on the move. You could forget Carlos VII; besides, without old Cabrera, Montemolín's nephew would never measure up Alfonso was dismissed out of hand—no more Bourbons. Perhaps a foreign prince, a constitutional monarchy and all that, although they said Prim preferred the queen's brother-in-law Montpensier And if not that then there was our friend Cárceles's great hope the glorious republic.

    "The glorious federal republic," added the journalist, giving Don Lucas a baleful look. "Just so that the toadies around here know what's what."
    Don Lucas flared at the gibe. He was an easy target. "That's right, that's right," he exclaimed with a dismayed snort. "Federal, democratic, anticlerical, freethinking, plebeian, and swinish. Everyone equal and a guillotine in the Puerta del Sol, with Don Agapito working the machinery. No congress, absolutely not. Popular assemblies in Cuatro Caminos, in Ventas, in Vallecas, in Carabanchel ... That's what Señor Cárceles's cohorts want. We are the Africa of Europe."
    Fausto arrived with the toast. Don Jaime dunked his thoughtfully in his coffee. The interminable polemics in which his colleagues engaged bored him enormously, but their company was no better or worse than any other. The couple of hours that he spent there each afternoon helped him salve his loneliness a little. For all their defects, their grumbling, and their bad-tempered ranting about every other living being, at least they gave one another the chance to give vent to their respective frustrations. Within that limited circle, each member found in the others the tacit consolation that his own failure was not an isolated fact but a thing shared in greater or lesser measure by them all. That above all was what bound them together, keeping them faithful to their daily meetings. Despite their frequent disputes, their political differences, their disparate moods, the five felt a complex solidarity that, had it ever been expressed openly, would have been hotly denied by all of them but that might be likened to the huddling together for warmth of solitary creatures.

    Don Jaime looked around him and met the grave, gentle eyes of the music teacher. Marcelino Romero was nearly forty and had spent the last couple of years tormented by an impossible love for the honest woman to whose daughter he had taught the rudiments of