LITMIR.BIZ

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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 mother.’

      ‘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.

      Somebody had brought them bad luck; for nearly all the other boats had made enough for the whole year round, and their crews would spend the winter repairing their gear, pottering about with a calking-iron and a pot of paint, preparing for the spring: somebody had brought them bad luck, and it was certainly Francisco. Not only was he unhandy and awkward, the sort of person who smelt of bad luck, but once he had hurried on board, hot from the firemen’s ball, still prinked out in collar and tie, and wearing shoes. In a gloomy silence they had thrown them into the sea: but what was that feeble act against such an omen? How much could a pair of shoes propitiate? Very little: and bad was all their fishing, very bad.

      The autumns, then, took Francisco away; but they did not take him far, only along the coast to Port-Vendres one year, and to Collioure another. There he made friends with a Swedish painter and came home with a box of colors and a parcel of brushes, filled with enthusiasm for the new way of painting. He had never given up drawing or painting little water colors since he left school, and now that he showed himself in Saint-Féliu with easel and canvas in the grand manner the people took it very calmly. They did not think much of his new way of painting; they had never thought much of his former manner – painstaking representation – for he had never had the trick of taking likenesses, which alone they admired; but they tolerated him. There are countries where it would not be permissible for a young fisherman to take up his stand and paint a street in public; the youths of his own age would not allow it for a moment, the little boys would stone him and even the dogs would be outraged; but France is not one of them. Saint-Féliu was quite prepared to watch Francisco paint, so long as he did not give himself airs.

      What little stir it did create tended to put Francisco into a slightly romantic rather than a ridiculous position, and this vexed Dominique, vexed and worried her. But if she had been able to hear the conversation of the two young people in the fragrant dusk of the orange grove beyond the tunnel she would have worried less. The conversation now took the form of a lecture upon aesthetics, very earnest, and very long: listening, Dominique would have heard nothing but Francisco’s voice going on and on, grave and expositive, sometimes deriding and sometimes indignant, but never pausing, except for the moments when Madeleine said yes. Dominique would have heard some strange things indeed, that a picture should never tell a story, that it need not even show a known form; that the cave men painted finer things than Ingres, and that it was very wicked to be an academic. She would have heard the words impressionist, primitive, futurist, expressionist, and abstract recurring again and again; and again and again the litany of Picasso, Braque, and Matisse, Maillol, Dufy, and Vlaminck. She would have heard all that and much more, if she had had the patience; but she would have heard nothing to cause her alarm. Dominique need not have worried, but she did, and the more she did so, the more eagerly she looked forward to Francisco’s calling-up: all safety seemed to lie in that blessed event. In her own short bloom she had been a flighty piece, widely affectionate, and she was sure that it would be the same with Madeleine: a few months’ absence and the young man would be lost.

      But

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