CHAPTER I

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THE MAYFLOWER

(_FLOR DE MAYO_)

_A TALE OF THE VALENCIAN SEASHORE_

BY

VICENTE BLASCO IBANEZ

TRANSLATED FROM THE SPANISH

BY

ARTHUR LIVINGSTON

NEW YORK

E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY

681 FIFTH AVENUE

COPYRIGHT 1921

BY E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY

_All Rights Reserved_

_First printing March, 1921_

Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS

I. THE WIDOW'S TAVERN

II. "SINA" TONA'S FAMILY

III. A FAMILY ENTERPRISE

IV. MARY AND JESUS MEET

V. TWO WOMEN QUARREL

VI. THE SMUGGLERS

VII. THE NAMING OF THE BOAT

VIII. THE "MAYFLOWER" PUTS TO SEA

IX. "PROOFS! PROOFS! ROSARIO!"

X. "AND STILL THEY SAY FISH COMBS HIGH!"

THE MAYFLOWER

CHAPTER I

THE WIDOW'S TAVERN

The morning of that day--it was a Tuesday of the Lenten season--could

not have dawned more promisingly. The sea, off the Cabanal, was in flat

calm, as smooth as a polished mirror. Not the slightest ripple broke the

shimmering triangular wake that the sun sent shoreward over the lifeless

surface of the water.

The fishing fleet had headed, bright and early, for the grounds off the

Cabo de San Antonio; and all the seines were out to take full advantage

of the perfect weather. Prices on the market of Valencia were running

high; and every skipper was trying to make a quick catch and get back

first to the beach of the Cabanal, where the fisherwomen were waiting

impatiently.

Toward noon the weather changed. An easterly wind came up, the dread

_levante_, that can blow so wickedly in the gulf of Valencia. The sea at

first was lightly wrinkled; but as the hurricane advanced the placid

looking-glass gave way to a livid menacing chop, and piles of cloud came

racing up from the horizon and blotted out the sun.

Great was the alarm along shore. In the eyes of those poor people,

familiar with all the tragedies of the sea, wind from that quarter

always meant one of those storms that bring sorrow and mourning to the

homes of fishermen. In dismay, their skirts whipping in the blow, the

women ran back and forth along the water's edge, wailing and praying to

all the saints they trusted. The men at home, pale and frowning, bit

nervously at the ends of their cigars, and, from the lee of the boats

drawn up on the sand, studied the lowering horizon with the tense

penetrating gaze of sailormen, or nervously watched the harbor entrance

beyond the Breakwater on whose red rocks the first storm waves were

breaking. What was happening to so many husbands and fathers caught with

their nets down off shore? Each succeeding squall, as it sent the

terrified watchers staggering along the beach, called up the thought of

strong masts snapping at the level of the deck and triangular sails torn

to shreds, perhaps at that very moment!

About three o'clock on the black horizon a line of sails appeared,

driving before the gale like puffs of foam that vanished suddenly in the

troughs of the waves to dart back into view again on the crests

succeeding. The fleet was returning like a frightened herd in stampede,

each boat plunging in the combers with the bellow of the tempest upon

its heels. Would they make the lee of the Breakwater? The wind in

devilish playfulness would here tear off a shred of canvas, there a

yard, and there a mast or a tiller, till a rudderless craft, caught

abeam by a mountain of greenish water, would seem surely to be swallowed

up. Some of the boats got in. The sailors, drenched to the skin,

accepted the embraces of their wives and children impassively, with

vacant and expressionless eyes, like corpses suddenly resurrected from

the tomb.

That night was long remembered in the Cabanal.

Frenzied women, with their hair down and lashing in the hurricane, their

voices hoarse from the prayers they shouted above the howling gale,

spent the whole night on the Breakwater, in danger of being swept off by

the towering surf, soaked with the brine from the biting spray, and

peering out into the blackness as though bent on witnessing the

lingering agony of the last stragglers.

Many boats did not appear. Where could they be ... _ay Dios, Dios!_

Happy the women who had their sons and husbands safe in their arms!

Other boys were out in that tumbling hell, driving through the night in

a floating coffin, tossing from white cap to white cap, dizzily plunging

into the yawning trough, while decks groaned beneath their feet, and

gray hills of water curled above to break down upon them in a destroying

surge!

It rained all night long. Many women waited out till sunrise, drawing

their soaked cloaks about their shivering bodies, kneeling in the black

mud and coal-dust on the Breakwater, shrieking their prayers to be sure

that God would hear, or, again, in desperate rage, stopping to tear

their hair and hurl the most frightful blasphemies of the Fishmarket up

toward heaven.

And when dawn came, what a glorious dawn it was! As if nothing at all

had happened, the sun lifted a smiling hypocritical face above the line

of a clean horizon, and spread a broad uneasy glitter of golden beauty

over waters that peacefully carried long streaks of foam from the

night's turmoil. The first thing that the rays of morning gilded was the

battered hulk of a Norwegian barkentine ashore off the Beach of Nazaret,

its nose buried in the sand, its midships awash, its bilges agape and in

splinters, while strips of canvas floated from the rigging tangled about

the broken masts.

The ship had carried a cargo of Northern lumber. Pushed gently along by

the lapping waves, timbers and boards were slowly drifting ashore, where

they were dragged out by swarms of black ants and disappeared as though

sunk in the sand. And they worked hard, those ants. The storm was just

what they had been waiting for. Beach-pirates were whipping up their

horses gayly along all the roads leading to the _huerta_ of Ruzafa.

Boards like that would make such fine houses! And the booty was all

theirs by rights! What did it matter if a girder were stained, perhaps,

with the blood of one of those poor foreigners lying dead back there

upon the shore?

Groups of idlers were gathered, with a few policemen, around some

corpses that were stretched out on the beach some distance from the

water. Strong, handsome fellows they had been, light-haired all; and

bits of white skin, soft and smooth, though muscular, could be seen

through the rents in their garments, while their blue eyes, glassy and

staring in death, looked up at the sky with a mysterious fixity.

The Norwegian had been the most sizeable wreck of the blow, and the

newspapers in town gave columns to it. The population of Valencia turned

out as on a pilgrimage to look at the hulk, half sunken in the shifting

sands. No one gave a thought to the lost fishing boats, and people

seemed not to understand the wailing and lamentations of the poor women

whose men had not come home.

The disaster to the fleet was not, however, so great as they had

thought. The morning wore on and several boats came in that had been

given up for lost. Some had made Denia or Gandia. Others had taken

refuge in Cullera Harbor. And each craft that appeared roused cheers of

rejoicing and thanksgiving throughout the village, which joyfully made

vows to all the saints who look after men of the sea.

In the end only one was not accounted for--the boat of _tio_ Pascualo,

the most thrifty saver of all the savers in the Cabanal, a man,

decidedly, with an eye for money, a fisherman in winter and a smuggler

in summer, a great skipper, and a frequent visitor to the coasts of

Algiers and Oran, which he spoke of always as "across the way," as

though Africa were on the sidewalk across the street.

Pascualo's wife, Tona, spent more than a week on the Breakwater, a

suckling baby in her arms and another child, a chubby little lad,

clinging to her skirts. She was sure Pascualo would come home; and every

time a fresh detail of the storm was given her, she would tear her hair

and renew her screams for the Holy Virgin's help. The fishermen never

talked right out to her, but always stopped at the significant shrug of

the shoulders. They had seen Pascualo last off the Cabo, drifting before

the gale, dismasted. He could not have gotten in. One man had even seen

a huge green wave break over him, taking the boat abeam, though he could

not swear the craft had foundered.

In alternate spells of desperation and strange exhilarated hope, the

miserable woman waited and waited with her two children. On the twelfth

day, a revenue cutter came into the port of the Cabanal, towing _tio_

Pascualo's boat behind, bottom-up, blackened, slimy and sticky, floating

weirdly like a big coffin and surrounded by schools of fish, unknown to

local waters, that seemed bent on getting at a bait they scented through

the seams of the wrecked hull.

The craft was righted and grounded on the sand. The masts were off even

with the deck. The hold was full of water. When the fishermen went down

inside to bail her out with pails, their bare feet, entangled in the

mess of line and baskets and cordage, stepped finally on something soft.

After a first instinctive cry of horrified revulsion, the men reached

down under water with their hands and drew out--a corpse.

_Tio_ Pascualo was hardly recognizable. His body was swollen, green, the

belly inflated to the point of bursting. The decaying flesh was gnawed

away in places by hungry little fishes, some of which, loath to let go

their prey, were still clinging to it by their teeth, wriggling their

tails and giving an appearance of disgusting life to the horrible mass.

The bold sailor's fate was clear. He had been hurled through the

hatchway by a lunge of the deck before the boat had been lost. Inside

there he had lain with his skull crushed. That boat--the dream of his

life, the achievement of thirty years of penny-saving--had proved to be

his coffin!

_Tio_ Pascualo's widow, in her hysterical weeping, shrank from the

repugnant body. The women of the Cabanal raised their voices in weird

lamentation and trooped in company behind the wooden box that was

carried at once to the cemetery. For a week _tio_ Pascualo was the

subject of every conversation. Then people forgot about him, save that

the appearance of his mourning widow, with one child in her arms and

another at her side, chanced to remind them of his grewsome end.

Tona, indeed, had lost not her husband only. Dire poverty was upon her,

not the poverty that is hard but tolerable, but the poverty that is

terrifying even to the poor, the want of the homeless and the

bread-less, the want that holds out a mendicant hand from the street

corner to beg a penny and give thanks for a crust of mildewed bread.

Help came readily while her misfortune was fresh in the minds of the

villagers. A subscription was taken up among the fisherfolk, and on the

proceeds, with other gifts that came in, she was able to get along for

three or four months. Then people forgot. Tona was no longer the widow

of a man lost at sea. She was a pauper ever on hand with the wail for

alms. Many doors were at last shut in her face, and old friends of her

girlhood, who had always welcomed her with a smile, now looked the other

way when she went by.

But Tona was not the woman to be crushed by general ostracism. _Eah!_

Enough of this bawling! We've got to get out of the dumps! She was a

woman with two arms like any other, and two brats that could eat and eat

and eat!

She had nothing left in the world but the wreck of her husband's boat,

in which he had died. It lay rotting out there on the beach, high and

dry, now soaked by the rains, now oozing tar under the flaming sun, the

mosquitos breeding in the muck inside.

Tona suddenly had an idea. That boat might be good for something. It had

killed the father of those tots of hers. Why should it not help to feed

them? _Tio_ Mariano, a tight-fisted bachelor, first cousin to the late

Pascualo, and supposed to be quite well off, had taken a liking to the

widow's children; and however much it pained him, he went down into his

pocket and gave her the money to make her start.

In one side of the boat a hole was sawed to make a door and a small

counter. Against the wall inside some barrels of wine, gin and brandy

were ranged in line. The deck was taken off and replaced with a roof of

tarred boards, to give head-room, at least, in the dingy hovel. At the

bow and at the stern two portholes were cut, and two partitions were set

up with the boards remaining--one "stateroom" for the widow, the other

for the boys. A shelter with a thatched roof was raised in front of the

door; under it a couple of rickety tables, and as many as half a dozen

bamboo tabourets. The whole outfit made quite a show. The hulk of death

became a beach cafe within easy reach of the _casa del bous_, the barn

where the oxen for beaching and launching the boats were kept, and at

the very place where the fish was brought ashore and where some one was

always around.

The women folks of the Cabanal began to rub their eyes. That Tona was

the Devil himself! See what an eye she had for business! Her gin and

brandy went by the barrelful. The men who used to go to the taverns in

town now got their drinks right there of her. They were always playing

_truque y flor_ on the shaky tables under the shelter while waiting for

the boats to put to sea, brightening up the games with glass after glass

of _cana_, which Tona averred was genuine imported Cuban rum.

_Tio_ Pascualo's stranded craft went sailing, wind astern, on a new

voyage toward prosperity. Out there on the rocking sea with the old

skipper's seines, the boat had never earned so much as now under the

widow's charge, though its seams were open and its timbers were rotting

away. Evidence of profit could have been found in the successive

transformations the old hulk kept undergoing. First curtains went up on

the stateroom windows, and if you looked inside, you saw new coverlets

of down, and white sheets. A coffee percolator began to shine like

polished gold on the counter. The shelter outside the door grew longer

and longer, with more tables and better ones. A dozen hens or more began

to cluck about over the white sand, bossed by a wicked rooster with a

tenor voice who was more than a match for any stray dog that came along

looking for trouble. From a pen nearby echoed the grunts of a hog too

fat to breathe without disturbing the neighborhood. And in front of the

counter, outside the hull, were two stoves with rice and fish sputtering

fragrantly in oil in their respective frying-pans. A going concern, no

doubt of that! Not a question of getting rich, you understand, but a

bite to eat for the boys! And Tona would smile and rub her hands

gloatingly. Not a cent did she owe in the world. The ceiling of the boat

was festooned with dry _morcillas_ and shiny _sobreasadas_--her favorite

sausages; and there were strips of smoked tunny, and a ham or two

sprinkled with red pepper. The barrels were full of drink. Along the

shelves stretched an array of bottles with liqueurs of every color. And

the pots and pans hanging on the walls could be set sizzling in an

instant with all kinds of good nourishing victuals. Just think of it! A

widow starving a short time since, and now already on Easy Street! Say

all you want--but God looks after decent people!

With plenty to eat and nothing to worry about, Tona seemed to grow

young again. Inside her boat there she took on a glowing well-fed

buxomness, and her skin, protected from the sun and brine, lost that

harsh baked bronze of the women who worked along shore. When serving at

the counter her ample breast sported inevitably one of an endless

assortment of colored handkerchiefs, _tomate y huevo_, complicated

arabesques of tomato red and egg yellow worked into thick well woven

silk.

She could even afford purely decorative luxuries. Above the wine casks

at the back of the "shop" the whitewashed timbers screamed aloud with

cheap high colored chromos that reduced Tona's neck-wear to silence,

quite. The fishermen drinking outside under the shelter would look up

over the counter and feast their eyes on "The Lion Hunt," "The Death of

the Good Man and the Sinner," "The Ladder of Life," not to mention a

half dozen miracle-workers with Saint Anthony in the place of honor; and

a cartoon showing the lean merchant who trusts, and the fat one who

sells for cash, with the customary legend: "If you want credit, come

back to-morrow!"

Tona could be quite properly satisfied at the relative comfort in which

her young ones were growing up. Business was getting better and better,

and an old stocking which she kept hidden between the foot board of her

bunk and the big mattress there, was gradually filling with the silver

_douros_ she had saved.

Sometimes she could contain her happiness no longer; and to view her

good fortune in perspective, as it were, she would walk down to the

fringe of the surf, and look back with welling eyes at the hen coop, the

open-air kitchen, the sonorous pig-pen, and finally the boat itself, its

bow and stern projecting from a maze of fences, cane-work and thatch,

and painted a clean dazzling white like some bark of dream-land tossed

by a hurricane into a barnyard.

Not that life did not still have its hardships for her. She got little

sleep. To begin with, she had to be up at sunrise every morning, and

oftentimes, after midnight, when boats would make shore late or be

leaving before dawn, the fishermen would start banging on her door and

she would have to get up and serve them. These early morning sprees were

the ones that made most money, though they caused her most uneasiness on

the whole. She knew whom she was dealing with. Ashore for a few hours

after a week at sea, those men wanted all the pleasures of land crowded

into minutes of pure joy. They lighted on wine like flies on honey. If

the older men soon fell asleep with their pipes dead between their

teeth, not so the sturdier boys, aflame from the privations and

abstinence of life at sea. They would look at _sina_ Tona in ways that

would bring gestures of annoyance from her and make her wonder how she

could fight off the brutal caresses of those Tritons in striped shirts.

She had never been a beauty; but her trace of fleshiness, her big black

eyes that seemed to brighten a clean brownish countenance, and

especially the light wrapper she would hurriedly throw on to attend to

her nocturnal patronage, lent her charm in the eyes of those healthy

youths who laid their courses toward the Valencian shore with joyous

anticipation of a sight of _sina_ Tona.

But Tona was a woman of brain and brawn, and she knew how to handle

those fellows. She bestowed no favors. When their words were over-bold

she would answer with disdain. To nudges she replied with cuffs, and

once when a sailor seized her suddenly from behind, she laid him flat

with a well placed kick, tough as iron and sturdy as a main-mast though

he was.

She would have no love affairs, even if other women did! A man would

never touch the end of her little finger, no siree! The idea, besides! A

mother of two children, little angels, sleeping there behind one

thickness of boards--you could hear them breathe, even--and she alone in

the world to support them!

The future of the boys was beginning to cause the mother hours of

thought They had been growing up there, on the beach, like two baby

gulls, nesting in the shade of the grounded boats when the sun burned

hotly, or hunting conchas and periwinkles on the shore uncovered at low

tide, their brown chubby legs sinking deep into the masses of seaweed.

The older child, Pascualet, was the living likeness of his father,

stocky, full-bellied, moon-faced. He looked like a seminary student

specializing on the Refectory, and already the fishermen had dubbed him

"the Rector," a nickname that was to stick to him for life. He was eight

years older than Antonio, a lean, nervous, domineering little fellow who

had Tona's eyes.

Pascualet became a real mother to his younger brother. While _sina_ Tona

was busy with the tavern, during the earliest days which had been the

hard ones, the good-natured boy had carried the baby around with the

tenderness of a nurse and had played with the young torments of the

water front with that snarling squirming brat in his arms, who would

bite and scratch when anything did not suit him. At night, in the

cramped "stateroom" of the tavern-boat, "Tonet" would stretch out full

length in the most comfortable place, letting his fat brother curl up in

a corner where he might, provided he did not disturb the little devil,

who in spite of his smallness ruled his elder brother like a tyrant.

The two boys would fall asleep to the lullaby of the waves which on days

of spring-tide reached almost to the tavern; and in winter, when the

cold wind would try to make its way through the seams in the old boat's

walls, they would snuggle close together under the same coverlet. Some

nights they would be wakened by the uproar from the drunken sailors in

the tavern, and hear the angry words of their mother, or the slaps she

would rain on impudent cheeks. More than once the frail partition of

their bedroom had threatened to give way as some staggering body fell

against it. But then they would go to sleep again, with the carefree

innocence of children, with no suspicions, and without alarm.

_Sina_ Tona had an unjust weakness for her younger son. In the first

days of her widowhood, when she saw the two little heads sleeping side

by side in the narrow cabin, resting perhaps on the very timbers that

had crushed their father's skull, she had felt an equal tenderness for

them both, as though the deadly bark were to destroy them as it had

killed Pascualo. But when prosperity came, and the memory of the tragedy

grew dim with the years, _sina_ Tona showed unmistakable fondness for

Tonet, a child of feline shrewdness, who treated everybody with

imperious petulance, but for his mother always had the speculative

fondness of a sly cat.

What a joy Tonet was for her, a beach vagabond at seven, spending the

whole day away from home with one gang or another, and coming back at

night with his clothes soaked and torn, and his pockets full of sand!

The older boy, meanwhile, now that his brother had been weaned from him,

would be in the tavern, washing dishes, waiting on customers, feeding

the hens, or watching, with grave responsibility written on his

features, the two frying-pans that were crackling on the stoves.

The mother, sometimes, on suddenly waking from a doze behind the counter

and finding Pascualet in front of her, would start with violent

surprise. Pascualo, for all the world! Just as she had known him as a

boy, before their marriage, when he was "cat" on a fishing vessel! The

same round jolly face, the same stout square-shouldered body, the same

stubby sturdy legs, the same expression of an honest simpleton with a

gift for plodding work that stamped him in advance as a steady reliable

chap, an _hombre de bien_. And the same inside, as well! Good-natured,

too good-natured if anything, and bashful! But a bull-dog when it came

to hanging on to money; and a mad fondness for the sea, prolific mother

of men of courage, strong enough and brave enough to earn their living

from her bosom!

By the time he was thirteen, the tavern had become quite uncongenial to

"the Rector," as he gave to understand with a word dropped here and

there, or with one of those occasional half-finished and incoherent

sentences, which were all that ever came out of that hard head of his.

He had not been born to the tavern business! Something altogether too

tame for him! That might do for Tonet, who didn't like real work

overwell. As for himself, he was a man of muscle, and he loved the sea.

No, he must be a fisherman like his father!

When _sina_ Tona heard such remarks the terrifying thought of the

catastrophe of that Lenten Tuesday would come back to her mind. But the

boy held his ground. Things like that didn't happen every day. And since

he felt a hankering for it, the profession of his father and his

grandfather was good enough for him; and _tio_ Borrasca, an old skipper

who had been a great friend of _tio_ Pascualo, thought so too.

One year when the drag-net season came around, the _pesca del bou_, as

the Valencians say, where two boats worked in team, Pascualet shipped

with _tio_ Borrasca as "cat," _gato de barca_, for his keep, and all he

might make, in addition, from the _cabets_, the small fry, shrimp,

sea-horses and so on, that came up in the nets from the bottom along

with the big fish.

His apprenticeship started auspiciously. Up to that time Pascualet had

gotten along on the old clothes his father had left. But _sina_ Tona

wanted him to begin his new trade with real dignity; so she closed the

tavern, one afternoon, and went off to a ship chandler's bazaar at the

Grao. The boy remembered the excitement of that visit to the stores for

years and years. What gorgeous things, those blue coats, those yellow

oilskins, those big rubber boots--only captains could afford them,

surely! But he was proud, withal, of his own helper's outfit--two shirts

of mallorquin, as stiff and prickly and rough as so much sand-paper, a

sash of black wool, a set of glaring yellow overalls, a red cap to pull

down over the back of his head in bad weather, and another of black silk

to go ashore in. For once in his life he had on clothes that fitted him.

He was through struggling with those old coats of his father that on

blowy days filled like mainsails and made him trot down the wind in

spite of himself. Shoes had been out of the question. Those nimble feet

of his had never known the torment of a leather casing.

And a real calling it was that the boy felt for the sea. The boat of

_tio_ Borrasca was more to his taste than the grounded hulk on shore

there with its grunting hogs and cackling hens. He worked hard; and to

supplement his wages he got a few kicks from the old skipper, who could

be gentle enough on land, but once with a deck under him would have made

Saint Anthony himself toe the mark. He could run up the mast to set the

lantern or clear a line as spryly as a cat. When the time came to

_chorrar_, to haul the nets, he would take his hand at the ropes. He

scrubbed the decks, stowed the baskets of fish in the hold, and kept

the fires going in the galley, so that the men of the crew never had a

chance to complain. And what luxuries in reward for all that enthusiasm!

When the captain and the men were through eating, the leavings were for

Pascualet and the other "cat," who had been standing by motionless and

respectful during the meal. The two boys would sit down on the bow with

black pots between their legs and loaves of bread under their arms. They

would eat almost everything with their spoons, but when scooping became

too slow, they would begin to mop the bottoms of the pots with crusts of

bread till the metal was polished and shining. Then they would carefully

collect the few drops of wine that the men had left in their tin cups.

Finally, if there was no work to do, the "cats" would lie down like

princes in the forecastle, their shirt-tails hanging out, their bellies

toward the stars, their faces pleasantly tickled by the breeze, till

they were rocked to sleep by the swaying of the vessel. There was

tobacco a-plenty. _Tio_ Borrasca was always raising a rumpus because he

couldn't understand how his pockets ran empty so soon, now of the

_alguilla_ of Algiers, now of the Havana fine cut--according to the

stock of the latest smuggler to make the Cabanal.

That was real life in Pascualet's eyes. Every time he came in, his

mother could see that he had grown, was stronger, tanned a darker brown,

but as good-natured as ever in spite of his fights with other "cats,"

husky little hectors who would stop at nothing, and who always puffed

smoke in your face, when you talked to them, from pipes as big as they

were.

These rapid visits home were all there was to remind _sina_ Tona that

she had an elder son at all. The mistress of the tavern had something

else on her mind. She was now spending entire days alone in her hulk

there. "The Rector" was offshore, earning his share of _cabets_,

returning only Sundays to hand over, with a show of pride, the three or

four pesetas that represented his week's wage. The other boy, that lost

soul Tonet, had turned out a regular waster--that was the very word for

him. And he never came home unless he was hungry. He had joined the

ragamuffins along shore, a swarm of wharf rats that knew no more about

their fathers than the homeless dogs who went with them on their raids.

He could swim like a fish, and all through the summer days he loafed

around the liners in the harbor, without a stitch on his lean sunburned

body, diving for the silver coins the passengers threw overboard. At

night he would come home, his trousers in rags, his face scratched and

bleeding. His mother had caught him several times fondly caressing the

brandy keg; and one evening she had had to put on her shawl and go to

harbor-police headquarters, where her tears and lamentations finally

got him loose on the promise that she would cure him of his ugly

weakness for scraping the bottoms of the sugar boxes stored on the

piers.

That Tonet was a limb of the Devil! And, _dios mio_, where did he get

it, where did he get it! How could two decent honest parents, such as

she and Pascualo had been, ever get to have a boy like that? With a

perfectly good dinner waiting for him at home, why did he insist on

sneaking around the steamers from Scotland, waiting for the watchman to

turn his back so as to be off with a dried codfish under his arm? No,

that boy was to be the death of her! Twelve years old, no inclination to

work, and not the slightest fear or respect for her, in spite of all the

broomsticks she had broken over his back.

_Sina_ Tona usually confided her troubles to a certain Martinez, a young

policeman who patrolled that part of the shore, spending the noon hours

under the cafe shelter, his rifle across his knees, his eyes vaguely

fixed on the horizon of the sea, and his ears filled with the running

plaint of the tavernkeeper. A handsome chap Martinez was, an Andalusian

from Huelva, slender and trim of person, natty as could be in the old

service uniform which he sported with a truly martial swagger, twirling

the corner of his blond mustache with an air that people called

"distinguished." _Sina_ Tona admired the man. After all, breeding will

come out! You can tell it a mile away. How Martinez talked, for

instance! You could see from his choice of words that he was a man of

schooling. For that matter he had studied years and years in the

Seminary up his way; and if now he was only a patrolman, it was because

he hadn't wanted to be a priest--he had quarreled with his family on the

subject--preferring to see a bit of the world by enlisting in the army.

The mistress of the tavern listened open-mouthed to the tales he told

about himself in a heavy Andalusian dialect where every "s" was like

"th" in "thing." In deference to his learning, she answered in kind,

floundering about in an absurd and unintelligible Castillian which made

people in the village laugh.

"See, _sinor Martines_, that jacknape of mine is driving me mad with all

his carrying on. I say to him, I say: 'Anything wrong in this house,

jail-bird? Well, then, why go tearing around with that gang of

good-for-nothings, who will die at the end of a rope, every one of

them!' now _oste sinor Martines_, you know how to talk in good grammar.

You just tell him what is what. You tell him they'll put him in the

lock-up at Valencia if he isn't a good boy."

And _sinor Martines_ promised to take the little rogue in hand, and he

did, in fact, give him a lecture, which reduced Tonet, for a moment at

least, to cowering in terror in the presence of that uniform and that

heavy gun, which the soldier would never let go of for an instant. These

slight favors gradually brought Martinez into the family, making his

relations with _sina_ Tona more and more intimate. He got his meals now

at the tavern, and spent most of his time there; and the mistress

finally had the pleasure of darning his stockings and sewing the buttons

on his underwear. Poor _sinor Martines_! What would happen to a fine

young man like him without a woman around? He would get to be as shabby

and disreputable as a stray cat. And, frankly, no decent lady could

allow that to happen!

Summer afternoons when the sun was beating full upon the deserted beach,

turning the baked sand into a fiery furnace, one scene would always be

enacted in the shade of the thatched roof of the tavern shelter.

Martinez would be seated on a reed stool with one elbow on the counter,

reading Perez Escrich, his favorite author, in bulging grimy volumes

with the corners worn down from having passed from patrol to patrol

along the coast. _Sina_ Tona was convinced at last. That was where he

got all those big words and that moral philosophy which stirred the

bottom of her soul; and she looked at the books with the superstitious

awe of an illiterate. Across the counter, mechanically sewing, without

thinking of what she was doing, she would sit looking at Martinez

fixedly, studying his thin blond mustache for half an hour at a time,

then the elegant lines of his nose for just as long, and finally the

exquisite skill with which he parted his hair, making two absolutely

even plasters of golden locks on either side.

Sometimes, on looking up at the bottom of a page, Martinez would find

the two black eyes of _sina_ Tona nailed upon him; and he would blush

and go on reading. Then afterwards the tavern keeper would be ashamed of

herself. The idea! When Pascualo was alive, she had looked at the fellow

casually once or twice, because she thought his face was interesting.

But now she sat there looking and looking and looking, like a fool! What

would people say if they ever caught her at it! Of course! She liked

him! And why not? So handsome, and such fine manners! And how well he

could talk! But after all, that was absurd. She was well on toward

forty, thirty-six or so, she couldn't just remember. And he, well,

twenty-four at the outside! But then again, and then again! What

difference did a few years make? She was not so bad looking. She carried

her age well. To settle that question, just listen to the men off the

boats who were always pestering her! And if it was all so absurd, why

were people gossiping about it? The other patrolmen, friends of

Martinez, and the fish-women on the beach, were always teasing them with

indirect allusions which, if anything, were too direct.

And the expected happened. To silence her own misgivings, _sina_ Tona

argued that her boys needed a father, and Martinez was just the man. The

courageous Amazon, who would cudgel the roughest sailor at the slightest

flippancy, herself took the initiative, overcoming the bashfulness of

that timid overgrown boy; and he, submissive rather than seeking,

allowed things to take their course, like a superior being with thoughts

absorbed in higher things, and responding to affairs of earth like an

automaton.

The matter did not remain long secret; nor was Tona displeased at the

talk. She wanted it known that the tavern had a man in charge. When she

had something to attend to in the Cabanal, she left the shop in care of

Martinez, who sat, as he had always sat, under the shelter, looking out

to sea with the rifle across his knees. Even the two boys understood

that something was going on. "The Rector," on his turns ashore, would

look at his mother with a perplexed expression on his face, and he was

timid and ashamed in the presence of that big yellow-headed youth in

uniform whom he always found about the tavern. Not so Tonet. That rascal

smiled broadly all the time, reflecting the gibes and sarcasms he had

picked up along shore. And he ceased to be at all impressed at the

sermons of the patrolman, which he now rebutted by thumbing his nose and

going off down the beach cavorting and turning handsprings.

Meanwhile Tona was passing through a new honeymoon in the full maturity

of life. In comparison, her marriage with Pascualo seemed like monotony

itself. Into her passion for the soldier she put all the vehemence of a

woman whose youth is sloping toward sunset, and she paraded her joy in

bold indifference to what people were saying. Let them talk! Let them

talk till their tongues wore out! Many women were worse than she was. Of

course the girls were sore at her carrying off a good-looking fellow

right under their noses!

Martinez, for his part, with the usual dreamy expression on his face,

let himself be kissed and pampered as though he deserved every bit of

it; besides his prestige had gone up not only in his squad but with his

superiors. Why not, with a boat full of the real stuff, not to mention

that stocking crammed with silver _duros_ that sometimes stuck into his

ribs as he lay down on the bed in the stateroom! To make sleeping more

comfortable he removed that annoying obstruction, and _sina_ Tona said

not a word. Was he not to be her husband? The money was all hers, and so

long as the tavern paid as well as it was paying, there was no need to

worry.

In four or five months, however, Tona began to go around with a long

face. See here, Martinez, _sinor Martines_, just come down out of the

clouds and listen to Tona for a moment. Tona is saying something to you.

She is saying that something must be done, in the circumstances. The

present situation cannot last. A satisfactory explanation must be ready

for what is bound to occur. A respectable mother of two children cannot

be the respectable mother of three children, without a man there to step

forward and say: "This is mine!"

And Martinez said: "_Bueno!_", but there was a sign of annoyed surprise

in the way he said it, as though he had suddenly bumped against some

hard reality in his plunge from the ideal heights where he always dwelt

as a man unappreciated by the world, and where he could dream at leisure

of becoming a general, a Dictator, and all the other things the heroes

of Perez Escrich become, in that imaginative writer's novels!

Yes, he would send for the certificates necessary for the marriage

license. But it would take time of course, because Huelva was a long way

off. Tona waited, with her thoughts on Huelva, a city hazy in the

distance, which she figured must be off around Cuba, or the Philippines,

perhaps. And time went by, while the situation grew more and more

alarming.

Martinez, _sinor Martines_, in two months ... Tona cannot pretend any

longer! People are noticing. What will the boys say when they find that

they have a young brother? But Martinez got cross. It wasn't his fault,

if the documents didn't come. She could see how many letters he kept

writing.

Finally the patrolman announced one morning that there was no other way

out of it. He would have to go and get those cursed papers himself, and

he had secured leave of absence from his captain. Fine! _Sina_ Tona

thought that was a good idea. She gave him all the money she had,

sleeked his hair one last time, wept a little, and ... "Good-by! And

don't be long!"

A patrolman going by one day was kind enough to tell her the real truth.

All that talk about going to Huelva was a lie. Martinez had been writing

for papers all right, but to Madrid, asking to be transferred to another

district at the opposite end of Spain, since the climate at Valencia was

not good for him. And he had won his point. He had been assigned to the

department of La Coruna.

That was a bad moment for _sina_ Tona. The thief! The bandit! You just

trust these smooth talkers! So that was to be her pay for giving him her

last cent--and combing his hair, the towhead, out there under the shed

in the afternoon, as kind and soft-like as a mother.

But for all of Tona's desperation, in a few weeks she was handing out

drinks across the counter while she nursed a white sickly girl baby, a

tiny little thing with blue eyes and an over-sized yellow head that

looked like a ball of gold.