I did so, at the cost, by the way, of a furious scene with Don Benito,
who shattered several test tubes in his wrath.
The cause of my brother's appearance was to advise me that the Alcaldia
del Centro, or Town Council of the Central District, had given notice to
the effect that if I did not present myself for the draft, I was to be
declared in default. As I had already laid before the Board a copy of a
royal decree in which my name was set down as exempt from the draft
because my father had served as a Liberal Volunteer in the late war, and
because, in addition, I was born in the Basque provinces, I had supposed
that the matter had been disposed of. One of those ill-natured,
dictatorial officials who held sway in the offices of the Board, took it
upon himself to rule that the exemption held good only in the Basque
provinces, but not in Madrid, and so, in fact, for the time it proved to
be. In spite of my furious protests, I was compelled to report and
submit to have my measurements taken, and was well nigh upon the point
of being marched off to the barracks.
"I am no soldier," I thought to myself. "If they insist, I shall run
away."
I went at once from the Alcaldia to the Ministry and called upon a
Guipuzcoan politician, as my father had previously advised me to do; but
the man was a political mastodon, puffed up with huge pretensions, who,
perhaps, might have been a stevedore in any other country.
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