The Catalans, Page 3

  It was not that these things shocked Dominique. And it is possible that the rare foreigner who did stop in dismay made too much of them: after all, the town had been brought up that way, and every mother in her time had been alternately slapped and kissed, spoiled and cowed. Everything was covered by the expression “It is stronger than me,” delivered with a little self-satisfied smirk, or “It makes my hand itch.” No further excuse to public opinion was necessary, and none to themselves: and in fact, though the children screamed, and though some of them grew up rather queer, not many died of their raising. On the other hand, outsiders could say, and say truly, that whereas in some foreign countries parricide is a monstrous crime, scarcely appearing once or twice in a hundred years, a thing to be spoken of with horror, remembered and shuddered upon for generations, yet here, in the local paper, it would not be worth a banner headline: a parricide would be found on an inner page, squeezed between the daily recipe and a piece on the control of insect pests.

  Dominique could not be shocked by what she had seen for all her life—could not react from the normal—but she was exceptional, and she remained exceptional. She did not batter her little girl about, she did not pull her hair, she did not slap her legs and shriek abuse at her—her voice did not even possess the bitter scolding note of the daily shrew. This was something so rare that it would have earned her the dislike of the street (no people are quicker to resent an implied criticism) if it had not been for the fact that Madeleine was, in general, somewhat less irritating than the other children: therefore, of course, there was no virtue in Dominique’s not beating her. Not that Madeleine was what could by any distortion of the term be called a good child, whatever the neighbors might say: she was dirty (when she was a little girl), untruthful, and dishonest. But being less battered, she was less dirty, untruthful, and dishonest than the rest. Certainly she was less irritating, for not only was she endowed with a happy, affectionate nature, but also with a mother who was protected from the smaller vexations of the world by well-ordered nerves and a high degree of mental calm: for in the matter of irritation, it is essential that there should be two people present; the worst-bred ape of a child cannot be irritating alone in a howling wilderness, and Madeleine, even at her worst, could not provoke a mother removed by a boundless expanse of absence, sitting at her counter or leaning on it, with her eyes round, wide open, and fixed upon nothing, nothing whatever.

  But still, kind though Dominique was, her kindness recognized a vast difference between those who belonged to her family and those who did not; and now that Madeleine was growing older—old enough now that no one could possibly mistake her for a boy—she looked at Francisco, and wished that her daughter had chosen some other man’s son to appropriate.

  The thought was no sooner clear in her mind than she spoke it: this was her way, and unless she were in one of her moods of abstraction it was rare that she let out a breath without some words upon it. It was her comfort to talk: the greater part of her life was passed in a haze of words, and if she had been prevented from talking with her customers, with her neighbors if there were nobody in the shop, or with herself if she were kept in alone by her duties, if she had been cut off from that delight, she would have pined clean away. Without her little gossip, she owned, she would never get through her day; and the life of a small shopkeeper in Saint-Féliu was no slight affair: she was up before it was light in the winter to meet the lorry that brought the milk, and already there would be customers waiting; then from that time she would not shut the door until ten o’clock on an early evening or eleven on a late one. This she did seven days a week for the whole year round. In some manner, too, between opening and closing the door, she fed her family and did her housework, besides selling salt cod, chick-peas, haricots, chicory, wreaths of garlic, bowls, glasses, soap, oil, wine, cheese, peaches, apricots, persimmons, melons, figs, medlars, all the fruit of their garden, all their vegetables, and brooms, sulphur candles, votive candles, ordinary candles, and a hundred other things beyond the list. This was in addition to collecting, arranging, and weighing every scrap of information about the private lives of all the families in the town, collating it with former knowledge and passing it on in a better form.

  She had a little help from her husband in the evenings with the accounts, but he worked nearly as many hours as she did, with the market-garden, the two vineyards, and the insurance-collecting that kept him so much from home, and she could be said to run the shop singlehanded. There was, of course, her sister-in-law next door, who had not half the custom, nor a quarter, and who would spend the most part of her day as often as not in measuring out the rice or sugar, or in preparing the lunch while Dominique satisfied the customers. There was also Mimi from the tobacco shop down on the corner of the street; when her husband was not at sea she would leave the shop in his charge and come to help at the busy time of day, for the shop, Dominique’s shop, was the ancestral place of trade, and they all felt a particular loyalty toward it.

  But this is not directly concerned with her thought about Francisco. The only person in the shop at the time of Dominique’s thought was an old woman who came down from Ayguafret in the mountains and carried back her provisions in a donkey cart.

  “It will be all right when he goes away for his military service,” said Dominique.

  The old woman was deaf; she replied that she would have no honey that year. The bees were all dying.

  “When he goes away for his military service it will be all right,” repeated Dominique, in a stronger voice.

  “Who?”

  “Francisco.”

  “Whose Francisco?”

  “En Jaume Camairerrou’s Francisco.”

  “I never heard of him.”

  “Yes, you have. He is En Cisoul’s cousin: your own godchild’s cousin-german.”

  “Which En Cisoul?”

  “The faubourg En Cisoul, of course,” adding in a louder voice, “En Jourda’s son, your own godchild.”

  “Oh? Well, I don’t mind him.”

  “I say it will be all right when he has gone for his military service.”

  “I dare say: but it was five francs a kilo in the war.”

  IT WAS FROM that time on that Madeleine began to feel that her family did not like Francisco. It was not that they forbade her to play with him—nothing so hard or definite—but there was an air of disapproval, and a determination not to be pleased with Francisco that survived even the nine days’ wonder of his name being in the paper: he was first in a drawing competition for all the primary schools of the department. Jean Fajal, a remote and silent man, usually benign, though wordless, stared at the paper for a long while and said, “He will grow proud, no doubt: too proud for his trade.”

  They had every worldly reason for discouraging the association. Francisco came from the most savage part of the faubourg, el Cagareill, the quarter in front of the sea, and his father, Jaume Cortade, called Camairerrou, was as poor as he was savage. He was very savage. Francisco himself was the product of a freakish passion for a Genoese woman, a strange waif who came in with one of the Corsican fishing boats: Camairerrou installed her in his uncouth hovel, where she died among the nets and lobster pots within the year.

  But it went on, in spite of their disapproval: it went on, but of necessity they saw less of one another once school was over and done with. Francisco went first, being the older: the schoolmaster wanted him to stay and go on to the school at Argelès, said it was a waste to leave now, and even called on old Camairerrou; but it was no good, Francisco wanted to be out, and the old man could see no reason why a boy who could pull on a rope should stay penned in a school. So he left, and at once he was a man. On the last day of his last term he was a boy, playing quite childishly with the other boys in the street as they went home; and on the first day of the new term he passed them as they straggled by the fish-market, he passed them with his sea-boots on, carrying a basket with En Cisoul, a hundredweight of sardines, for the boats had been out all night.
He nodded to them as he went by, but it was a man nodding to boys of his acquaintance, not a boy grinning at his equals.

  This change impressed Madeleine beyond words: she had always thought him wonderful, but this new fine creature in tall sea-boots and a scarlet handkerchief struck her dumb: she felt that she had been far too familiar, far too presuming, and for a while she fell back into her position of an unarmed, suppliant admirer.

  But she too was changing. She was not yet the equal of her lovely cousin, Mimi’s daughter Carmen, but her childish plainness had quite gone. She was growing into her features, and she was shooting up like a young willow; already she had that supple, upright, thoroughbred carriage that is supposed to come from carrying burdens on one’s head. Her nose was still unformed, and a great deal of the child lingered about her face, but her fantastic bloom of complexion had begun, and it was obvious, even to her family, that she was growing into a very handsome young woman.

  It was at this time that she attracted the attention of Mme. Roig. Mme. Roig had known her before—she knew everybody—but she had not taken any particular notice of the girl until one day Madeleine and her Aunt Mimi decorated the chapel of the Curé d’Ars, acting as substitutes for three women who had all eaten the same poisoned dish of mussels. Mme. Roig was a widow, the widow of Gaston Roig, of the rich family of Saint-Féliu: she was a great power in the parish church, a childless woman, respected, but rather feared than liked in the village. She invited Madeleine to her house, interested herself in her, and interfered with her natural development.

  It appeared at first that Mme. Roig had probably taken her up with a view to converting her, for Madeleine was a Protestant—a Protestant at least in the mild and unemphatic manner of the Protestants of Saint-Féliu. So was her family, except for Mimi l’Empereur, but there was no sectarian fire in their religion, none in Saint-Féliu at all, where every day, from ten o’clock to half past ten, the curé and the pasteur walked together on the beach. This was a strange anomaly in such a vivid place, with violence and passion overflowing for the smallest disagreeing word: but there it was, a settled and acknowledged fact. Perhaps the explanation was that the people had almost no religious sense at all, were almost wholly pagan in their lives: but whatever was the underlying cause, they seemed as happy in the temple as the church, and practically indifferent to both.

  But if it was conversion, Mme. Roig did not persist: she was content to have the child, the young woman one might almost say, as a very pretty and submissive friend, overflowing with vitality and cheerfulness, a companion for odd afternoons. Presently Mme. Roig found that Madeleine had grown quite indispensable to her: she had a great deal to do, looking after her own big house and her nephew’s too, as well as keeping a strict eye on the curé’s housekeeper. She had a great deal to do, being a thorough, active-minded woman: there were her orphans, her charities, the decoration and the cleaning of the church, the dressing of the saints, and she found a younger pair of legs very useful. It was not only this severely practical view, however, that made Mme. Roig feel that it would be impossible to do without her: when the worst of Madeleine’s shyness had worn off—those early visits had been hours of torment for her, torment in anticipation chiefly, for she always enjoyed it when she had been there a little while—when she became more confident with Mme. Roig, she entered wonderfully into the old lady’s somewhat dried affections.

  In the end Mme. Roig justified herself by giving Madeleine presents from time to time, suitable presents like woolen stockings and calico drawers, and sometimes lace and handkerchiefs; by a private determination to do something handsome when Madeleine should marry; and by teaching her to sew, to keep accounts, and type. Mme. Roig could sew and sum admirably well herself; she had learned the first in a convent that was as famous for its sewing, its embroidery and lace as for its piety—a convent in the north of France—and the second while she looked after her brother’s house, he being vicaire général at Perpignan. But the typewriter, as she admitted, was beyond her competence; however, she did not condemn it for that reason or its novelty. She thought it a more useful accomplishment than the piano, and she bought a M. Boileau’s system of typewriting and taught Madeleine from it on the machine in her nephew’s office—taught her much as a man who cannot swim instructs his pupils from the edge of the swimming-bath.

  Madeleine and Francisco, then, were very much more apart than they had been for years; but still it was rare that a day went by without their meeting. All through the long summer the boats were out almost every night, and Madeleine, hitherto a slugabed, would be up and waiting at the crack of dawn, standing at the edge of the sea, watching for the boats to come round the point. They would come in, nearly always from the north, round the short breakwater on the left-hand horn of the little bay’s crescent, and if the tramontane was blowing, as it was so often, the first would come in fast, heeling from the wind and shaving the steep-to foot of the jetty, and the crew would all cheer as they came round it. There would be a man standing in the bows, leaning up along the tall prow-piece and outlined black against the dun sail, and the moment he saw the beach he would utter the long, wavering hail of the first boat in, the ritual cry of Blue Fish. Then the buyers on the shingle would shriek back in their strange trade jargon, and before the long boat crunched up against the shore the sardines would be sold.

  Sometimes it was Francisco’s boat that was first, but not often, for it was not a lucky boat: if any of the boats of Saint-Féliu caught a dolphin or a shark or a moonfish or any of those unwanted captures that rip the sardine and anchovy nets to fragments, it was the Amphitrite: sometimes, and not rarely, the Amphitrite would be the last of the boats to come in, to reach a shore deserted by the buyers, nobody on it at all but the remaining fishermen of the more fortunate crews and Madeleine.

  But whether it came early or late it looked beautiful to Madeleine, the long, low boat like a grayhound, with its queer, squat, forward-raked mast—a strange, urgent angle for a mast—its tapering yard with the great triangle of a sail, and the crew crowded all along the length of the low gunwale.

  They did not speak now on the beach: a catching of the eye and a private smile was all, now that they were so much more conscious. It was not the same in the evening, however; the atmosphere was different then, and when there was dancing on the Place they always danced together. Charming they looked, charming, as they skipped busily round and round in the Saint-Féliu version of a quickstep, and more charming by far when they stood hand in hand, grave and poised, in the entranced circle of the sardana dancers, with the harsh Catalan pipes screaming through the summer darkness, and the faint brush-brush of all the feet, rope-soled, cutting fast to the measure of the drum, while the hands and heads, held high, swam as if they were hung upon the music.

  In the evenings, too, they walked together, aimlessly among shadows on the ramparts, or on to the jetty, where the warm stone gave back the heat of the long day’s sun. They would stay until it was time for Francisco to go and help prepare the boat for the sea: often they would stay longer, and each would have hard reproach that made no impression upon their closed and dreaming faces.

  Now the first hint of the everlasting shrew began to show in Dominique’s voice, and now it grew still more confirmed in Thérèse. They would set upon Madeleine when she returned, in turn or both together.

  “Where have you been?”

  “Yes. Where have you been?”

  “She has been with that good-for-nothing”

  “Starveling”

  “Do-nought”

  “Lover of hers.”

  “For shame, Madeleine.”

  “Madeleine, for shame.”

  “You knew there was so much to do in the shop.”

  “You should help your mother in the evenings.”

  “Not run about like a bitch in heat.”

  “Or a cat in the night.”

  “With her legs swollen by standing all day.”

  “When I was a girl I helped my mo
ther.”

  “We all helped our mother, poor thing.”

  “Poor little thing, alas.”

  They both shed tears, and began again, “Carmen helps her mother.”

  “Yes, Carmen does not roam about.”

  “Carmen is a good girl.”

  “If Mme. Roig knew she would have nothing more to do with you.”

  “She would say, ‘Madeleine, my heart bleeds for your mother and aunts, poor things.’ ”

  “And that would be an end of your fine goings-on.”

  Madeleine heard little of it all, and they hardly expected that she would listen attentively; but sometimes her complacent air, like a cat that has eaten the cream, so provoked them that her aunt, rushing round the cloth-covered table with the lamp on it, would shake her frantically by the shoulders, shouting in her ear “Now then; now, now!”

  Her mother never shook her, but she nodded when Thérèse did, and when the man of the house was there during one of these scoldings she would say, “It is only your father’s goodness of heart that prevents him from beating you,” in a voice directed as much at Jean as at Madeleine.

  Dominique was becoming seriously worried now, and she longed for the time when the young fellow should be taken away for his military service, far away, to the other end of the world for preference, and for a long, long time. But although Francisco grew taller every day, and looked more and more like a full-grown man, capable of any mischief—Dominique’s clients already assured her that he was better at making Sunday-children than catching fish—his class was still far from being called. And daily, as he grew, he appeared more and more undesirable in her eyes. He had already earned a bad reputation among the fishermen as a lazy fellow, a passenger, and if the crew of the Amphitrite had not been afraid of old Camairerrou, Francisco would have been on the beach after a few weeks’ trial. They did not like him. It was not merely that he was backward in hauling on the nets, waiting to be told what to do instead of being there in front of the word like another boy; it was not that when it came to picking up the great skeins of sun-dried nets at midday Francisco was not to be found; it was not merely the usual complaints against idleness and inefficiency; it was worse than that. He brought them bad luck. There was no doubt that some man or some thing did. The season’s fishing, the long, long hours of night at sea, the wet cold, the interminable pulling on the heavy sweeps when a dead calm fell, all the hardships they had undergone, did not bring them in enough to live the winter through. Not enough, that is, for the married men: old savages like Camairerrou or El Turrut would hibernate, staying in bed for days on end with three loaves and a jug of wine, emerging from time to time to fish from the shore with a rod or to indulge in a night’s smuggling over the border. The others, once they had looked to their vineyards, would have to find work, either day-laboring or as stevedores at Port-Vendres when the Spanish schooners came up with oranges.