Page:Plays by Jacinto Benavente - Third series (IA playstranslatedf03benauoft).pdf/181

. Not all physicians are like you.

. No, Doña Carmen, there are doctors who receive more for a successful operation—successful except for the patient, who usually dies—than a matador does whose name is at the head of the bill. There are money-changers in all temples. To us, who respect our profession as a holy priesthood, it is sorrowful indeed.

. You see so much suffering that you are powerless to relieve.

. Yes, we do. I have seen much during my professional career. I began as a country district doctor, if you know what that implies. For ten years I wandered through those Spanish villages, as abandoned of God as of man, the country places of Castile, whose soil is the color of Franciscan sackcloth, and verily one might believe that they were consecrated to the asceticism of the Seraphic Saint. We say in Madrid: "How healthy it is to live and to be brought up in the country!" Marvellously healthy, indeed! As for the children, no more need be said. Every one of those towns is Herod's own kingdom. As ceaselessly as the reapers cut the grain in the summer, death harvests its infants throughout the course of the year. It could not be otherwise. The children are dirty, undernourished; the exhausted mothers are obliged to wean them prematurely, for one is scarcely born before another succeeds to its place, to sap her vitality. Yes, death may move quickly, but life, too, does not rest. In consequence, a child who grows up, a stroke of lightning could not harm. As these are the ones visitors see as they pass through the villages, they exclaim: "How healthy, how strong these children are!" But those of us who have lived in these towns, who have seen what they are, who have been victims, as I have been, of their desolation, entertain a different opinion. I lost