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WITH COTTAGERS IN MOUNTAINS 173
did I bite it off? and don’t you owe me your life, there-
fore?” runs through the audience like wildfire.
“Damned thief! He should be made shorter by a
head!” they cry out; and a confused mutter runs from
mantoman. They offer their assistance to the speaker
as he interprets his story, help him out with vigorous
interpolations and encourage him by interjecting
spirited remarks.
Then a seventeen-year-old shop-clerk jumps to his
feet. A year ago he was taken prisoner down in Jerez
as the ringleader of an insurrection. He was mal-
treated by the gendarmes and taken to the prison of
Rio Frio, where he was kept for several months. Now
he is actively at work again. He attacks the priests,
declaring them to be piggish, stupid, ignorant, hostile
to culture, and demonstrates in forceful periods that
all great men have been pagans. He has the soft un-
developed form and features of a child, and his face
beams with infantile pleasure as the audience clap
their hands in stormy applause. The sonorous gift of
Spanish eloquence seems to have been given to him in
his cradle, for all the most incendiary slogans in his
language trip lightly over this child’s tongue. You feel
somehow that he is a sort of middleman who acts as
mouthpiece for those whose thoughts he does not
understand.
Don Louis pitches into the state savagely: “Capi-
tal, Church, State—what a lovely Trinity!” cries Al-
fonso, as he holds three fingers of his hands in the air.
In the street outside the crowd buzzes with excitement,
imagining the thing is to come off to-night. On the
next corner the uniforms of a few gendarmes flash in
the moonlight. In the packed meeting hall the men’s
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