LITMIR.BIZ

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hating her at the thought of that thief of a Martinez – whom the Devil take in due time!

      So it was only off and on that God looked after decent people! Things were not going so well as they used to go, in the early days of Tona's widowhood. Other old hulks had been turned by copy-cats into taverns along the beach; and the fishermen could choose where they would go. She, besides, was not so pretty as she had been once; and the younger fellows were not so eager to buy drinks of her on the chance of getting something more. The tavern was living on its old habitués, and bringing in just enough to keep the wolf from the door. More than once Tona would walk down to the water as she used to and sadly look back at the two stoves now cold, the fences now rickety and tumbling down, the pig-pen where a lean hog scarcely ever grunted at all, and the half dozen hens hungrily pecking about the sands. How time dragged for her in that stultifying life of solitude, which was enlivened only when Tonet got into trouble or when Tona's eyes would fall on a picture of siñor Martines in uniform, which she had hung up in the stateroom as a constant and refinedly cruel reminder of her one mistake.

      Little Roseta, a favor left behind in the tavern-boat by the considerate patrolman, gave her mother hardly a moment's peace. She was growing up like an untameable wildcat. Every evening Tona had to go and hunt for her before she could shut her up in the boat after a hard spanking; and from morning till night she would never be seen unless she happened to be hungry. Thy will be done! One more cross for poor Tona to drag through this vale of tears! Taciturn and fond of her own company, Roseta would lie out full length on the wet sand, playing with shells or making piles of seaweed. She would sit for hours with her blue eyes staring into space with fixed hypnotic vacancy, the breeze twirling her yellow locks, as twisted and withy as so many snakes, or blowing up the faded old frock that reached the knees of two slim legs, shiny white, which had known no stockings other than the coat of brown the sun burned over their extremities in summer. Or for hours also she would lie face downward on the sand, which would take on the imprint of her body under her, bathing her face in the thin ripple of water that the surf threw up and sucked back again over the shining beach spangled with all the capricious tracings of moiré.

      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 glass in the café 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 Cabañal.

      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 passion 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 fònt de Gas, and go glass 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 ragamuffins 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 ashore 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 Cabañal, 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 Cabañal, she always had one of her placid wistful smiles for him; and she spent her afternoons with siñá 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 Cabañal 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 cocked 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! Siñá 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 unassuming and never saying a word, who took her sewing down to the beach with Roseta, and was always timidly asking whether siñá Tona had had any word from Tonet. As time went on, the three women from the old hulk there on the shore 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 siñora tona The Woman who keeps The little café 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 shores 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 siñá 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 siñá Tona was hurt to the quick that he never brought a cent home any longer, and,

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