As he was racing through the Psalms, impatient because of their dearth of pictures, my eye was caught by the familiar passage, "As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after Thee, O God."
With prompt curiosity, he popped down his white head, in its close-fitting skullcap, to see what I was noting, and instantly went off into an immoderate gust of laughter.
"_Muy bien!_" he wheezed, as soon as he could recover anything like a voice. "But that is very cleverly put. He was a witty fellow who wrote that. Just so! Just so! The deer goes to the water because he means to get something for himself, and that is why the young men go into the priesthood, and why the women go to mass. It's all selfishness, is religion. But how well he says it!"
"No, no!" I exclaimed, for once startled into protest. "He is saying that religion is the impulse of thirst."
The incorrigible old worldling took this for another jest, and, as in gallantry bound, laughed harder at my sally than at poor King David's.
"Excellent! Perfect! So it is! So it is! Religion is the impulse to fill one's own stomach. Just what I have always said! 'As the hart panteth after the water brooks'--ho, ho! I must try to remember that."
His enthusiasm for Calderon soon kindled to a flame. As the plot thickened he ceased to be of the slightest help in any difficulties that the text might offer. In vain I would beseech him to clear up some troublesome passage.
"Oh, never mind!" he would say, vexed at the interruption. "They didn't write very well in those old days. And I want to know which of her three suitors Justina took. Three at once! What a situation! _Vamos á ver!_ I hope it will be Cipriano."
As the spell of Calderon's imagination passed more and more strongly upon him, this most sympathetic of readers quite accepted, for the time being, the poet's Catholic point of view, trembling for Cipriano and almost choking with agitated joy when Justina, calling in her extremity upon the name of God, put Lucifer to flight. But after we had read the drama to the end, through its final scene of triumphant martyrdom, he sat silent for several minutes, and then shook his head.
"Not true; it is not true. There is no devil but the evil passions of humanity. And as for Cipriano's definition of God--it is good, yes; it is great, yes; but who can shut God into a definition? One might as well try to scoop up the ocean in a cocoanut shell. No! All religions are human fictions. We have come, nobody knows whence or why, into this paltry, foolish, sordid life, for most of us only a fight to gain the bread, and afterward--_Bueno!_ I am on the brink of the jump, and the priests have not frightened me yet. Afterward? _Vamos á ver!_"
