She was an incorrigible truant, a chip of the old block, as Tona put it, thinking of that loafer who had been responsible for her, and who also sat staring day in day out at the horizon like a good-for-nothing idiot, half awake. If Tona had had to depend on that girl for a living, a fine mess she would have been in! Lazy, irresponsible, was no name for it!
Couldn"t wipe a plate or wash a gla.s.s in the cafe without breaking up housekeeping! Put a herring on to fry when she was tending the fire and she"d burn it black! Much better to let her run the beach or go to the dressmaker"s shop in the Caba.n.a.l.
At times the child showed a mad eagerness to study, and at the risk of a whipping, would run away from home and go to the village school. But when Tona found this out and was inclined to encourage her, she would play truant all the time. It was only in summer that she was of any use at all. Then a fondness for money could be reconciled with her pa.s.sion for roving aimlessly here and there; so during the bathing season, she would take a jar almost as big as herself, fill it with water from the _fnt de Gas_, and go gla.s.s in hand among the bathers, or even among the carriages driving on the pier, shaking her tangled yellow head of hair and crying in rather a faint voice: _Al ua fresqueta!_ Other times it would be a basket, instead, filled with cakes, seasoned some with salt and some with sugar, which she hawked plaintively about: _Salaes y dolses!_ In this way Roseta would bring as many as two _reals_ to her mother in the evening, and Tona"s face would brighten up, for with business going as it was, she was getting selfish.
That was the story of Roseta"s infancy and girlhood--a frowning antipathy toward people generally; a menacing submissiveness to her mother"s whippings; hatred for Tonet who had never paid the slightest attention to her; a smile at times for the Rector, who, on his brief visits home, would playfully twitch one of her yellow curls; and scorn for the ragam.u.f.fins of the beach whom she refused to play with and held off with the haughty reserve of a queen forty inches long.
Tona eventually lost all interest in the child, though Roseta was her last resource in that miserable hovel which, in the long nights of winter, was as lonely as a tomb. Tonet and the teamster"s daughter were her one concern. That wench was bent on carrying off everything Tona had in the world! First it had been Tonet; but now Dolores had stolen the Rector also. For when Pascualet came ash.o.r.e of late he would barely look in at the tavern-boat and then be off to the truckman"s house where, evidently, he was a far from troublesome witness to what the lovers were doing. But it wasn"t so much that, in itself, as the influence Dolores was coming to have with the boys, and thus spoiling a plan that Tona had had for a long time, of marrying Tonet to the daughter of an old friend of hers.
For mere looks, Rosario could not, of course, compare with the daughter of _tio_ Paella; but her goodness--the strong point of insignificant human beings--was something Tona could not praise highly enough, though she never mentioned the most important thing of all, that Rosario was an orphan. Her parents had kept a store in the Caba.n.a.l, and from them Tona had bought her stock. Now that they were dead, the girl was left with a fortune almost, three or four thousand _duros_, to put it low. And how the poor thing loved Tonet! Whenever she met him on the streets of the Caba.n.a.l, she always had one of her placid wistful smiles for him; and she spent her afternoons with _sina_ Tona on the beach, just because the old lady was the mother of that bantam who was forever turning the village upside down.
But nothing good would ever come of that rogue! Not even Dolores, with all the control she had over him, could keep him in hand when one of his fits of deviltry came on. He would disappear for weeks at a time, when everything was as nice as you please, and then you would learn, not from him but from what people said, that he had been in Valencia, sleeping daytimes in some house in the Fishmarket district, getting drunk every night, beating the bad women of cheap lodging houses, and setting the whole town in an uproar whenever he had come off a heavy winner in some gambling-dive of the slums.
It was on one of these sprees that he took the foolish step which cost his mother days and days of lamentation and weeping. Tonet, with some other boys of his kind, went and joined the navy. Life in the Caba.n.a.l had grown too tame for them, and the wine there had lost its flavor. And the time came when the wretched scamp, in a blue sailor suit, a white cap c.o.c.ked over one ear, and a bundle of clothes over his shoulders, dropped in to bid Dolores and his mother good-by, on his way to Cartagena where he had been ordered to report for service.
Good riddance, after all! _Sina_ Tona was fond of her boy, but he wouldn"t be getting into trouble again for a while! What a pity, though, for that poor girl Rosario, so modest and una.s.suming and never saying a word, who took her sewing down to the beach with Roseta, and was always timidly asking whether _sina_ Tona had had any word from Tonet. As time went on, the three women from the old hulk there on the sh.o.r.e followed all the voyages and stops of the schoolship _Villa de Madrid_ with Tonet on board as able seaman. And how excited they would get when the postman would throw down on the wet counter a narrow envelope, sometimes sealed with red wax and then again with bread dough, and a complicated address written all over it in huge fat letters: "_For sinora tona The Woman who keeps The little cafe near The barn on the Beach._"
A strange exotic perfume seemed to come from the four pages of rough paper--a suggestion of trees and flowers the poor women did not know, of tempestuous seas, of sh.o.r.es draped in rosy mists under skies of fire, of Cuban negroes and Philippine Chinese, or of great cities of South America. What a boy, eh? What a lot he would have to talk about when he came home! Perhaps that crazy idea he had had of going away to see the world would be the making of him in the end. And _sina_ Tona, with a return of the preference which made her idolize her younger son, felt an occasional flare of jealous anger as she pictured her Tonet, her fine brave little boy, off on that navy vessel under the strict discipline of cross officers, while the other one, the Rector, whom she had always thought a sleepy-head, was getting on in the world like anything, and had come to be quite a person in fishing circles.
Whenever Pascualet went out now, it was on shares with the skipper of his boat; and he had his secrets with _tio_ Mariano, the important individual whom Tona fell back on in all her plights. The boy was making money, I"ll bet you, and _sina_ Tona was hurt to the quick that he never brought a cent home any longer, and, indeed, now called at the tavern-boat, and sat a moment or two under the shelter outside, more for appearance"s sake than anything else. He was saving his earnings, then!
Well, who was keeping the money for him! Dolores! Dolores, of course, that witch who had given love-philters to both her boys--otherwise, why were they always following round after her as if they didn"t dare say their soul was their own?
The Rector stuck to the teamster"s house as if the poor fool thought he had some business there! Didn"t he know, idiot, that Dolores was for the other one? Hadn"t he seen Tonet"s letters and the answers she got a neighbor who had been to school to write for her? But three times donkey that he was, without paying the least attention to his mother"s gibes, the Rector kept on going there and taking the favored place his brother had enjoyed, and apparently without appreciating the progress he was making. Dolores was now attending to him as she had to Tonet. She kept his clothes mended, and,--something she had never been troubled with in the case of that roistering loafer--she also was taking care of his savings.
One day _tio_ Paella was brought home dead. He had got drunk and fallen from the seat of his cart, both wheels pa.s.sing over him. But he died true to his reputation and just as he had lived, his whip clutched in one hand, sweating brandy from every pore, and the wagon full of the girls he spoke of, sacrilegiously, as his "flock." Dolores had no one else to lean on in her trouble than her _tia_ Picores, the fish-woman, a chaperone not in every sense desirable, for she tempered kindness with fisticuffs.
Then it was, some two years after Tonet had gone away, that the big surprise occurred. Dolores, _gran dios!_ and the Rector, were getting married. The Caba.n.a.l sat up nights discussing the overwhelming piece of news. And she did the proposing, I"ll have you know! And people added other spicy bits of information that kept the laughing going. Tona talked more picturesquely than she had ever talked before. So Her Royal Highness of the Horseshoe, that wench of a teamster"s daughter, was getting into the family, as she had always meant to do! Well, that Queen Virtuous knew which side her bread was b.u.t.tered on. Just what she needed--a husband with a thick skull and nothing inside it, who would be able to work like a cart-horse from morning till night. The pickpocket!
Just like her to steal the only man in the family that could earn a cent!
But then suddenly Tona thought of something, and she broke off her tirade. Better let them get married! That simplified the situation and favored her own plans. Tonet would now take Rosario! Though it was hard to swallow it all, she consented even to attend the wedding and say _filla mehua_ to that scheming hussy who changed her men as she changed her clothes!
But what would Tonet say, what would Tonet do, when he heard the glad tidings? That was something to worry about, because everybody remembered the kind of temper he had when he got angry. So another surprise was due when the boy wrote back that everything was all right and that he was glad of it. Been away so long, you see, new faces, new places! That, doubtless, was why he found it so natural that Dolores should take a husband, since she had no one else to fall back on. Besides,--and this is what Tonet himself said--it was better for her to marry his brother than run any risk on some one else; and the Rector was a good sort, too.
And the sailor showed himself just as reasonable when he turned up in the Caba.n.a.l one evening, with his discharge papers in his pocket and his bundle of clothes slung over his shoulder, surprising everybody with the fine appearance he made and with the reckless way he threw money around from the back pay he had just collected. Dolores he greeted affectionately as a sister he was fond of. Oh, that? What the devil!
Don"t even think of that! It was all right, all right! He had not been having a bad time himself on his trip around the world! And, in the midst of the popularity he was enjoying as a returned hero, Tonet seemed to forget all about Dolores and the Rector.
In front of the door of _tio_ Paella"s old place, now occupied by Pascualet, the villagers would sit in the open air all night sometimes, on low stools or on the ground, listening open-mouthed while the sailor told about the countries he had visited, embroidering his adventures with harmless embellishments to rouse greater thrills in his simple-minded audience. As compared with the uncouth fishermen they knew, dull and stupid from the routine of daily toil, or with the stevedores he used to work with in Valencia, Tonet looked like an aristocrat to the girls of the Caba.n.a.l, with his palish-dark face, his carefully curled mustache, his hands clean and well manicured, his hair sleek and neatly brushed with a parting in the middle and--pasted down on his forehead--two cowlicks just visible under a silk cap!
_Sina_ Tona, for her part, was quite satisfied with her boy. As much of a scamp as ever, but he had himself more in hand, and it was evident that the navy discipline had done him good. The same old Tonet, but he had been taught to dress better and cleaner, and he could drink without drinking too much. A dandy still, but not sure to be getting into jail every other minute, and less bent on venting the caprices of a law-breaking daredevil than on satisfying the selfish cravings of a rake!
Proof of such progress was that he now took kindly to his mother"s suggestions. Marry Rosario? No objection! Good girl, and a penny or two, that would be just the thing for a man of ideas, and the brains to carry them out. Money, after all, was what he needed. You couldn"t expect a fellow fresh from the Royal Navy to go back to lugging bags and boxes on a wharf! Anything but that! And to _sina_ Tona"s unbounded delight, Tonet took Rosario to wife.
Everything went finely. That was a handsome pair now, wasn"t it?--a tiny little thing, Rosario, timid, obedient, believing in her husband as she believed in G.o.d; and Tonet, proud of his good luck, carrying himself as stiffly as if, under his flannel shirt, he had a coat-of-mail, made of his wife"s silver dollars, dispensing favors to right and left, living like a village squire, smoking his pipe all afternoon and evening in the tavern, and sporting long rubber boots on days when it rained!
Dolores showed no trace of emotion in the presence of her former sweetheart--only in her domineering eyes one might have seen an intenser sparkle, a glint of golden fire,--telltale evidence of yearnings unconfessed. And a happy year went rapidly by. But the money which penny by penny had been painfully a.s.sembled in the wretched store where Rosario had been born, streamed away between the fingers of the spendthrift husband; and the cow was running dry, as the mistress of the tavern-boat observed to her son one day, in a lecture on prodigality.
Along with poverty, discord, tears, and finally the flying fist entered Tenet"s house. Rosario joined the neighbors on the beach and began to dirty her hands on the slimy fish baskets. Falling from her high estate as heiress and lady she became a fish-woman, one of the poorest and hardest-working followers of that soul-killing trade. She was up now every morning shortly after midnight, waiting on the sh.o.r.e with her feet in the puddles, drawing a frayed and threadbare shawl about her shivering body, when the storms blew. All the way to Valencia she would go on foot carrying that back-breaking load of fish, and it would be dark again by the time she got home, faint with hunger and fatigue, but happy withal because her lord and master could still live the life of a gentleman without any humiliations to translate into swear-words and beatings. That Tonet might pa.s.s his night in the cafe, swapping stories with engineers from the steamers or skippers from the fishing boats, she would, many a time in the Fishmarket in town, stifle the hunger that gripped her at sight of the cups of steaming chocolate and the breaded chops her companions were busy with at the tables in their stalls.
The important thing was to keep her idol appeased, an idol so quick to wrath, so p.r.o.ne to curse the rotten marriage he had made. He had to have his _peseta_ for the night"s session at coffee and dominoes. He had to have his square meal and his flashy flannel shirts. He had a reputation to keep up. And so long as he had what he wanted, the poor little wife, thinner and more peaked every day, found all her struggles well worth while, cost her what it might. She was an old woman before thirty, but she could boast of exclusive proprietorship of the handsomest buck in the Caba.n.a.l.
Privation brought them closer to the Rector"s household, which, while they were going down and down, was going up and up, on the wings of prosperity. Brothers have to stand together in hard luck. Of course!
And Rosario, though much against her inner preferences, went to see Dolores often, and accepted a renewal of intimate friendship between her husband and his sister-in-law. She was worried, but there must not be an open quarrel. The Rector would get mad; and he it was who kept them going on weeks when no fish came in, or when the village dandy found nothing to get a commission on as go-between in one of the little business deals that feature life in a seaport town. But the moment came when the two women, deadly enemies underneath, could pretend cordiality no longer. Four years after her marriage, Dolores was at last able to announce the coming of an heir to the Rector"s fortune; and the Rector, with a silly smile on his moon-face, advertised the auspicious event on every hand--and all his acquaintances were delighted, though they smiled with a sly wink he did not notice. No one really knew, to be sure. But funny, wasn"t it! That rather deliberate decision of Dolores corresponded strangely with the time Tonet had become a less frequent visitor to the cafe and had begun to spend more of his time in his brother"s house.
The two women now spoke their minds with the savage frankness of their station. The breach between them became permanent. Tonet kept going to the Rector"s place, but alone; and that made Rosario very angry, and the quarrels in her home now ended always in ferocious cudgelings. And the time came when Rosario began to say openly that the baby looked like Tonet. Her husband meanwhile stuck closer than ever to the Rector, who had revived his old fondness for his younger brother, letting himself be sponged on in spite of his tight-fistedness. The pretty daughter of _tio_ Paella poked biting fun at that wreck she had for a sister-in-law, that old hen, quite _pa.s.see_, poor as a rat, a mere day laborer of the meanest kind, who couldn"t hang on to the man she had married! Tonet, in fact, as in earlier days, was again following Dolores around like an obedient dog, sitting up when he was told to sit up, and charging when he was told to charge.
A withering blast of relentless hatred, of flaying jest and stinging insolence, swept from the old home of _tio_ Paella, now repainted and with a new ell, toward the wretched tumble-down shack where Rosario had finally taken refuge in her penury. And well-meaning busybodies, with the holiest good-will toward both, kept telling what Rosario had said about Dolores and what Dolores had said about Rosario, taking care that every apostrophe should reach its destination and receive its fit reply.
When Rosario, flaming with anger and weeping from sheer despair, would simply have to tell some one of her troubles, she would go off to the tavern-boat, which, like its mistress, was also aging rapidly with the years. There she would be listened to in silence, with an expression of sorrow, or a shake of the head from _sina_ Tona and Roseta, who were living on in sullen antipathy toward one another in spite of their relationship, agreeing only on one thing, that men were beneath contempt. The old hulk, that served them as lair, was a sort of vantage point from which they were able to follow the war between the two families.
"Men! Men! What fleas!" _sina_ Tona would say, with a glance at the picture of the patrolman, who seemed to be the presiding genius of the place. "Men! Crooks every one of them, not worth the rope to hang them with!" And Roseta, with her big bright sea-green eyes--the eyes of a virgin who knows all about the world and is quite sure of herself--would murmur for once approvingly: "And those who are not scamps like Tonet are like the Rector--puddingheads!"
CHAPTER III
A FAMILY ENTERPRISE
Though spring had not yet come, the sun was so hot, that day, that the Rector and Tonet, to talk things over down on the beach, had sought out the shade of an old boat drawn up high and dry on the sand. There would be plenty of time to get their tan on when they got out to sea. The two men talked slowly and sleepily as if the glare and the heat along sh.o.r.e had gone to their heads. A real day, come now! Who would have thought Easter was still a week away, when, usually, there were squalls all the time and sudden tempests.
The sky, overflowing with sunlight, had a whitish sheen. A few silver clouds were lazily drifting along like handfulls of foam scattered hap-hazard over the expanse of heaven; and from the heated sands a damp radiation was shimmering, giving tremulous, hazy outlines to objects in the distance. Nothing was going on along the beach itself. The _casa del bus_, where the launching oxen were idly chewing their cud, rose with its red roof and its blue tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs, over long lines of boats drawn up on sh.o.r.e to make a sort of nomad city with streets and cross roads, much like a Greek encampment of the Heroic Age, when the triremes were used for entrenchments. The lateen masts, gracefully tilted forward, with their points blunt and fat, looked like a forest of headless lances. The tarred ropes twined and intertwined like lichens and vines. Under the big sails, which had been lowered to the decks, a whole people of amphibians was swarming,--red legs bare and caps pulled down over ears--repairing nets or tending galley fires where fish were frying with appetizing fragrance. The hulls, of wide bilge, painted white or blue, stretched away along the glaring sh.o.r.e, like big-bellied sailors lying on their backs and taking the sun.
In this improvised city, which might, before the night was over, be broken up and scattered to the four winds beyond the girdling horizon, the order and symmetry of a modern town laid out by a surveyor could have been discerned. In the front line, nearest the waves which rippled in like thin blades of crystal over the spangled sand, were the little boats, the trollers, _al volanti_, tiny spry craft that looked like chicks of the heavy boats lying, in the row behind, in pairs of the same size and color--_barcas del bu_. In the third file, the retired veterans of the sh.o.r.e, old hulks, their sides wide open, their worm-eaten ribs showing through the black gaps, reminded one of the decrepit nags used in the bull ring, and lay meditating, it seemed, on the ingrat.i.tude of men who do so little for deserving old age.
Rust-colored nets, with flannel shirts and trousers of yellow baize, were strung along most of the masts; and above this array of color, some gulls, apparently drunk with sunshine, were leisurely planing in wide circles, occasionally dropping for a moment into the sea, where the water was shivering and seething in blebs of light under the high noon.
The Rector was talking about the weather, letting his yellowish eyes wander sleepily and placidly over the sea and down the coast. Along the green horizon line some pointed sails dotted the sky like wings of doves that might have been drinking off there. The sh.o.r.e at this point receded, forming a bight in the land, with ma.s.ses of green and cl.u.s.ters of white cottages alternating along the coast. Here were the hills of the Puig, big swellings in the low-lying strand, which the sea sometimes swept over in its angry moods. And there was the castle of Sagunto, its wavy ramparts curling up and down along the summit of the ridge of caramel brown. Beyond that, and closing the horizon sh.o.r.eward, was the saw-toothed Cordillera, with ripples of red granite, its unmoving crests reaching up to lap the sky like tongues.
Yes, the good weather had come early that year! You could take it from the Rector! Everybody from the Caba.n.a.l knew that, in such matters, he had inherited from his master, _tio_ Borrasca, an instinct that never failed. A puff or two next week, a bit of chop, but nothing much! The stormy season was over ahead of time, thank heaven, and a fellow could earn an honest day"s pay without fear of putting to sea.
The Rector talked drawlingly, biting at a black "cardoon" from a smuggler"s stock, his whole being swallowed up in the majestic slumber of the sh.o.r.e. Above the peaceful lulling whispers of the sea, the voice of a girl came from far away, up from under the ground, it seemed, chanting the monotonous cadence of a hoisting song: _Oh ... oh ... isa!_ and a number of boys would tug at the mast they were stepping, pulling all together at the proper beat in the sleepy rhythm. It was dinner time; and tangle-haired women kept calling in shrill notes from the galley doors; for the "cats" were off gadding in the barn, looking at the oxen. In every direction the heavy mallets of calkers could be heard hammering away in deadening regularity. And all these noises evaporated, as it were, into the vast, light-filled calm, where sounds and things took on outlines of fantastic indistinctness.
Tonet studied his brother"s face expectantly, waiting for that phlegmatic fellow, to whom words came so hard, to finish formulating his proposal.
At last the Rector came to the point. In two words, he was tired of making money penny by penny and day by day. He wanted to make a killing as so many others had done. There was a living in the sea for any man.
Some people ate bread black, after sweating for it; others took it white and without the crust, for a moment"s work--but risking something! You get the idea, eh, Tonet!
But the Rector did not wait for Tenet"s reply. He got up and walked to the bow of the old boat, to see if any one were eavesdropping on the other side.
Not a soul! The beach was deserted as far as the eye could see, away along to the bath-houses at the resort, where the Valencians came to play in summer. Beyond lay the harbor, p.r.i.c.kly with masts from the shipping, and flags everywhere, a maze of cross-trees and yards, red and black smokestacks and cranes that looked like gibbets. Seaward stretched the Breakwater, a cyclopean wall of red bowlders heaped up in confusion to make a lee on that storm-swept sh.o.r.e. As background to the whole scene, the tall buildings of the Grao, warehouses, office buildings,--the aristocracy and money of the port; and then a long straight line of roofs, the _Caba.n.a.l_, the _Canamelar_, the _Cap de Fransa_, a rambling agglomeration of many colored houses, less close together as they left the water, summer places in front with many stories and slender cupolas, white cabins behind, where the farm land began, the thatched coverings of the huts rumpled by the strong sea winds.
There were no spies around. The Rector sat down again at his brother"s side.
His wife had put the idea into his head. He had thought it over carefully, and come to the conclusion it was a good one. A trip "across the way," as people remembered his father used to say, over to the _costa d"afora_, to Algiers! No fishing, you understand. Fish aren"t always around when you need them most. No, not that! But a cargo of contraband, the boat crammed to the decks with _alguilla_ and _flor de mayo_, G.o.d of G.o.ds! There, _rediel_, was business for you! And that was what the old man had done a thousand times. Well, what did Tonet say?
The honest Rector, who would never have dreamed of breaking a town ordinance or a harbor rule, laughed like a saint in heaven at the thought of that haul of tobacco which for days and days had been dancing before his eyes, till now he could actually see the fragrant bundles standing there wrapped in burlap on the sand. He was a son of the Spanish coast, proud of the deeds of his ancestors. In his eyes smuggling was the one thing a self-respecting sailor could take up when he got tired of fishing.
Tonet thought it was a bright idea. He had made two trips like that, though as ordinary seaman. Now that business was dull on the wharves, and _tio_ Mariano hadn"t gotten him that job in the coast and harbor survey he had wanted so, there was no reason why he shouldn"t go along with his brother.