Читать книгу The Catalans - Patrick O’Brian - Страница 6

When Madeleine was a little girl she was a plain creature, and timid. Her form was the undistinguished, pudgy, shapeless form of most children; there was no feminine delicacy in her face – or very little – and if her hair had been cut short she might have passed for a plain little boy.

Nobody considered her a good-looking child; and even her mother and her aunts, when they had finished scrubbing and frizzing and ornamenting her for her first Communion, could say no more than that the little Baixas girl (a downright ugly one) did not look half so attractive. Madeleine felt the lack of conviction in their voices, and she agreed with them entirely; but for her part she did not mind at all. Indeed, she laughed heartily when her father said what a good thing it was that she had a veil; for in her own family, in the dark room behind the cave-like shop, or in the clear, white, dustless mercery next door, she was a cheerful soul, happy to find humor in the thinnest joke, and brimming over with that élan which caused her to talk, chant, and spin about for the greater part of the day. It was only when she was out of her home that shyness came down over her: then she would blush if a stranger spoke to her, and in an unfamiliar house she had no voice at all.

She was plain and timid, then, and even in her own opinion devoid of charm or importance; but this did not prevent her from pursuing Francisco Cortade, her school-fellow. She pursued him openly, without disguise, and he accepted her attentions, if not with pleasure, at least without repulsion.

She thought he was the most beautiful creature she had ever seen; and without exaggeration he was a lovely little boy – huge eyes, a great deal of black and curling hair, and an absurd complexion. She brought him presents from the shop, rousquilles – the little round dry white-iced cakes the Catalans eat on holidays – twigs of raw licorice from the mountains, nuts, anything that could be concealed under her pinafore; and if she could not bring him anything from the shop she would give him the croissant or the fougasse that she was supposed to eat at eleven. It was a disinterested passion, for although he would take her offerings civilly enough, he would hardly ever let her play with him – he was too old, far too old, he said – and if he ever let her walk with him from school he would desert her instantly for a troop of boys. He treated her very badly, but it seemed just to her, and she was grateful for his kindness in always taking what she brought.

Then occasionally he would be very kind: on Thursdays or in the holidays she would sometimes find him by the boat his father fished in, the red and yellow Amphitrite; and then, if he were alone, he would let her come aboard and be the crew or the enemy, or whatever fitted in.

It was some time after her first Communion that the first hint of modesty showed itself in Madeleine. Up until that time she would reply ‘He has just run away,’ or ‘He is down by the sea’ to the question ‘Where is your sweetheart?’ – a question that the people of the street would ask her once or twice a day. Now she would frown heavily and deny him, or she would say that she did not know where he was, and did not care: and now she stopped bringing him rousquilles, and in doing so she saved her conscience many a reproach and her heart many a wild fluttering. It was not that she stole the rousquilles or the licorice, but she took them without explicit leave: she had always felt that there was a great difference, but still she always chose the time when there was nobody in the shop, and more than once, caught standing on a chair beneath the rousquilles’ shelf, or spoken to when the offering was half hidden in her pinafore, she had gone pale with horror, or scarlet red; and afterward it needed a fair amount of argument to convince herself that she had done no wrong. But now this almost daily trial was done, and now at eleven o’clock she ate her roll or cake, and she ate it skipping or howling with the other little girls.

At first Francisco did not notice this change, but after some days it was borne in upon him that he no longer had a devoted follower, and that the stream of rousquilles had dried up, apparently for ever. He was puzzled, worried, at a loss to understand. He could not say how it had happened, nor when it had begun: and then there was no reason; he had not been unkind to her for weeks. After some thought he began to make advances. He left the school quickly and lurked about until she appeared, but when he said that she could walk with him if she liked, she ran fast away to go hand in hand with Carmen and Denise, and he was left sad and foolish behind.

Two days later he bought two croissants and gave her one at break: he waited until she had finished her own before he offered it, and she was glad to take it. In an access of reconciliation he said that he had a dried sea horse for her in the boat, and they shared his second croissant.

It is true that he soon recovered the upper hand, but it was a more even friendship now, and so it continued. In the village school of Saint-Féliu such things could be; elsewhere they might have been mocked and laughed to scorn, but not here. They continued, consecrated now by habit, rising form after form, reaching decimals and long division; they learned the Merovingian kings and passed the gap-toothed stage; by the time they reached the Revolution Francisco was already talking gruff.

It was toward this time that Dominique, Madeleine’s mother, began to look pensive when she saw the two walk down the narrow street together. For a long, long while Madeleine and her sweetheart had been a joke with the street, and Dominique had laughed as much as any. She had called her daughter a hussy, a one for the men, and so on: she had often and often called Francisco into the shop to give him his pick of the squashed peaches, or a caramel or a piece of gingerbread. She was a fat, jolly woman in those days, and she liked to see children pleased and happy around her. In this she was in no way exceptional, in Saint-Féliu or anywhere else, but she was exceptional for Saint-Féliu in that she succeeded – succeeded, that is, in making them pleased and happy when they were with her. It was not that she was clever – far from that. She was rather a stupid woman, and given to long spells of absence, during which she would stare in front of her like a glazed cow, thinking of nothing at all; but by some gift of being she was better at the management of a child than any woman in the quarter. It may have been her plumpness, for fat people are said to be calm of spirit, or it may have been some natural sweetness, but whatever the cause, the house never knew those screaming, tearing scenes that broke out three or four times a day somewhere along the street, those horribly commonplace rows in which a woman, dark with hatred and anger, may be seen dragging a child by the arm, flailing at its head, and screaming, screaming, screaming a great piercing flood of abuse, sarcasm, and loathing right into its convulsed and wretched little face. These scenes were so ordinary in Saint-Féliu that anyone turning to stare would be known at once for a foreigner.

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 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 still the years passed slowly, and still he did not go. She did have one respite, for Carmen died, and at the tail of her noisy grief the recollection came to her that now Madeleine was to be secluded and dressed in black. This dried her tears, and the event that she had sincerely mourned seemed now a positive relief.

Yet even in Saint-Féliu mourning for a cousin cannot last for ever: it can take up a great deal of energy, black cloth, and time, but it has an end, and the day came when Dominique and her two sisters sat working out the date again, the time of the young man’s removal, reckoning up the months with an angry impatience.

As it came nearer Dominique looked forward to it with pleasure and relief: but when it came she was not in Saint-Féliu, nor was Madeleine, nor was her husband, nor any one of her uncounted relatives and friends and customers. Grass, knee-high, was growing against her shuttered door, and between the cobbles of the street grass and long-drawn weeds strained up toward the narrow slit of sky: the fishing boats, dragged up to the Place and chained there, lay sunk in a green haze of grass, and in the grass the trodden lanes showed the track of the German sentry’s round.

The inhabitants of Saint-Féliu were dispersed about the interior, and the Fajals were far inland, right under the mountains of Andorra, where some remote cousins had a farm. Francisco, with many others, was in Germany, working at forced labor in a factory; a great many more were in camps as prisoners of war; a few were in North Africa, having escaped through Spain; and six from Saint-Féliu were dead, killed in the early fighting.

It was a strange, slow nightmare, all that period, impossible to relate to real life. That only began again with the return to Saint-Féliu, with the opening of the long-shut familiar doors, with the re-creation of something like the known old life, going to the same pump with the same crazy, shrieking handle, going up the same number of stairs to bed, waking in the dark to hear the same cry of the fishermen waking the laggards, ‘Xica-té, es l’alba.’

Real life appeared to begin again as soon as the Germans had gone, but in fact a long interval of excess came between that time and the new normality – excess of happiness, excess of relief, excess in eating. It would be wrong to add excess in welcoming the return of the men from captivity; excess is not the word at all, but rather unbounded rejoicing and a tendency in the free and overflowing generosity of that time to attribute equal worth to all who returned from that gray and brutish land. Thus Francisco and the others who had gone with him were received with almost as much joy as the soldiers whose glory was reflected on them. It was not that they did not deserve a hearty welcome from their friends, but these young men who had been taken for forced labor had done nothing heroic: they had not volunteered to go, it is true, but they had let themselves be seized, while others had taken to the mountains rather than work for the enemy, and some had gone over the seas to fight again. At the time Madeleine had wondered; even in the middle of her sorrow and wretchedness, she had wondered that Francisco had been taken: they had certainly swooped down unexpectedly; but still she had wondered.

But that was all forgotten now in this great rush of feeling. There was no room in the whole town for anything but joyful ebullience, an almost frantic merriment; and when Francisco burst through the shop in the evening a few days after his return, plunged into the back room where all the Fajals were sitting, and told them that he was going to marry Madeleine at once, they made little more than a general, formal objection.

There was a scene, of course. Nothing of that sort could possibly have passed without a scene of kinds: there was a fair amount of screaming, a very great deal of shouting all together, and some tears. But the elders did not really have their hearts in it, the strong-minded sister Mimi was away, and in the end tears were dried all round, and Francisco, late though it was, went off to see the mayor.

In the interval between this emotional evening and the marriage Dominique’s objections were held in abeyance to a fair degree. She uttered some gloomy prophecies, but at the same time helped to prepare the clothes for the occasion with a lively pleasure. She defended the wedding against Mimi’s protests with so many arguments that she nearly convinced herself, and she dismissed Mme. Roig’s disapproval with a short and dry ‘If she does not like it, let her remain in her own house: that is all I say; let her remain in her own house.’

She could not but admit that she had a handsome prospective son-in-law: he was well over six feet tall now, loose-limbed and gangling still with the contradictory grace of youth; his hair curled in black waves all over his head as it had done when he was a boy, but now there was an appearance of open, frank virility in his lean face. He had not come back from Germany so thin as some, nor nearly, but he was lean, and he had a continual appreciative appetite. It had been a little piping boy that Dominique had fed with caramels not so many years before, but now his big, deep barrel of a chest was filled with a thundering baritone, and when he sang the glasses hummed on the table. And yet, for all the virility in his face and for all the depth of his voice one would not have said that there was anything very manly there – the impression was certainly not that overwhelming masculine, beer-and-skittles, hairy impression that some men give. There was an admixture of sweetness, gentleness, or docility, something very unlike the desperate male carapace of toughness that the young men of Saint-Féliu put on with their breeches, a quality that could be described as wonderfully romantic or a trifle mawkish, according to the observer’s sex or degree of liking for the man.

It was a hint, no more: nothing could be more inaccurate than to show him as a softy, or as anything like a softy, a young man who could be made game of with impunity by his fellows. He did not look like that at all. In any country he would have been reckoned a tall man, and here he towered over the little dark Catalans: and there was enough of his father – the old Camairerrou with a proved and shocking reputation – in his face to make it clear that you could not play with him.

As a son-in-law he had improved in his connections, by no effort of his own. Camairerrou had distinguished himself during the Occupation by drowning one of the occupying German soldiers and by taking to the mountains when the evacuation of Saint-Féliu was ordered: there, continuing his trade of smuggling over the border, he had fallen in with an organization that passed refugees down into Spain, and knowing every path and cave in that wild neighborhood, knowing them even in the dark, he had been able to pass over several Allied airmen, secret agents, and Frenchmen bound for Algiers. Whenever it had been possible he had exacted a thumping great fee for his services, but when it had been clear that no money was to be had he had taken the men over for nothing. This, and the fact that when he had been paid he had invariably performed his bargain, redounded very much to his credit after the Liberation: so did the knowledge that somewhere in his house he had all the fees surrendered by his paying customers. He was still a lamentable father-in-law for Madeleine, but no longer an unmitigated disaster.

So they were married. They were married cheerfully, but with a background of gloomy muttering. They were married in the mairie with the tricolor, and in the temple with orange blossom, legally and sacramentally, and they were married in the Café de Gênes with dried sausage and anchovies, cakes and sweet wine, popularly.

Throughout the day, with the increasing effect of the wine and jollity, the forebodings of the elders had died down; but in the morning, with the wine quite gone and a general deflated sense of anticlimax abroad, they began again. They were ill-timed forebodings, intrusive and sometimes ill-natured; they were founded less on logic than on emotion, but they soon began to prove themselves to be true.

In the circumstances it would have been strange if they had not been true. The young couple lived in the upper part of a house belonging to the Fajals at the back of the town: it was a dank, narrow house stuffed into an interior angle of the fortifications, and the sun could not reach it at any time. The lower part of the house was a store, and the upper part had been arranged with the idea of letting it to summer visitors: but the scheme had been quite unsuccessful and for years the stiff, bright-yellow varnished wood furniture had stood rigidly on the shining linoleum, cold even in the flood of August. It was an unhappy arrangement: in the first generous flush the intention had been to give it unconditionally to Madeleine and Francisco as a home; but very soon the flush receded and as there had been no exact terms – nothing specified on either side – the elders began to withdraw the implied gift, until by the end of the year the place was little more than a set of furnished rooms where the young people were allowed to live.

It had begun simply enough: the women of the family had been naturally fascinated at running in and out of ‘Madeleine’s apartment’ as it was called at first, and naturally they came without invitation. They came to help her clean, sweep, and cook: her mother (an excellent cook) had taught her none of these things, but they were all very much surprised that she did not know how to do them by intuition. And they came, with the liveliest curiosity, to stare: there was little enough to see or know, but what little there was they wanted to see and know and talk about.

Then, when the disapproval of Francisco began to revive, they began to come into the house even more as by right; and her father, who surprised Madeleine by showing a greater jealousy of Francisco than the others, silently rearranged the furniture to his liking – replaced it in the positions it had occupied before the marriage.

It was a fairly slow process, this dispossession: it went on little by little, but it was nearly complete in twelve months. It was hardly a conscious process on either side; but on the side of the elders it was as efficient and unhesitating as if it had been carefully planned and concerted: more efficient.

However, the novelty, the romantic glow, the conventional happiness carried Francisco and Madeleine through the first year. It was the second that brought so much conscious unhappiness. During the first year the sea, unfished for so long, yielded such quantities of fish that the oldest man had never seen the like, and the market, starved of fish for so long, was insatiable. There was plenty of money in Saint-Féliu, summer and winter, and even the Amphitrite earned enough to install an engine and to buy a lamparo, a little boat with a pair of huge lights to attract the fish by night, in the Spanish fashion.

But the next year was different. The summer was cold and unnatural and the anchovies stayed away from the coast altogether; even the sardines were very scarce, and somebody – the men of La Nouvelle, it was said – began dynamiting them. Soon everybody was doing it, scooping up the shattered little fish from the surface and hurrying furtively back to port: it could not last; not only did the preventive officers come, but the fish went clean away, and not all the motors or lamparos in Saint-Féliu would bring them back.

Madeleine and Francisco had, very early in their marriage, fallen into the habit of going to the family shop for meals. It had begun with Madeleine’s complete incapacity – she really could not boil an egg at first – and had continued because it was so much easier and because Dominique loved to have a talking crowd around the table. In the first year it had been convenient; it had not been necessary. Now it was essential, and now Francisco and Madeleine arrived with a hang-dog air, and now any quip or jibe about their extravagance in the first year’s prosperity went home and rankled. The quips and jibes, the ‘remarks passed’ were rarely meant to be as unkind as they sounded sometimes, but it was remarkable how accurately those rather stupid women and that dull, heavy-witted man managed to say just the thing that would hurt most afterward, upon reflection.

They had been a little extravagant, it is true: Madeleine had bought clothes; they had often gone to Perpignan for the day, and still more often to Collioure, where Francisco’s clever friends were to be found on the beach or in the cafés; he had bought canvases, colors, and a better easel. But it had seemed at the time that no one thing was more than a very little treat; there had been no single example of unjustifiable expense, and after all, as they had said to one another, a few hundred francs more or less would not make a great difference by the end of the year.

It was not an agreeable situation, and it was less so for Francisco than it might have been for another, for his bad conscience made him vulnerable. He had not found casual work at the end of the fishing: he had not found it for the plain reason that he had not wanted to find it. He said to the family that it was not to be found (with a regretful shake of his head) and he had said to Madeleine that it was not to be found (with a grin of relief) and that he would have to pass the winter at home. They agreed that out of the evil came the blessing that he would have an uninterrupted stretch of time for his painting. He did: but it costs money to paint, and although the family could always be relied upon for help in kind, they would never part with cash.

Now Madeleine was glad that she had learned to type: she had never ceased seeing Mme. Roig in spite of the widow’s disapproval of her marriage, and now she went and asked for her good offices with her nephew, Maître Roig, the lawyer, who sent most of his typing to a bureau in Perpignan. She, who had disliked the marriage too much to countenance it with a present, yet felt too much engaged by her use of Madeleine and by her interior promise, as well as by her affection for her, to feel at all easy, was very happy to do what Madeleine asked: she went at once, without stopping to put on her hat, and in ten minutes the thing was done. It proved an invaluable source of supply: it not only bought Francisco’s materials and many of their meals, but it enabled him to spend a good part of his time with his friends at Collioure.

Painting is a messy business: it cannot be carried out in a shining little parlor where the position of each object is sacred. A room that is to be kept immaculate for wakes and marriages, the polished morgue of a self-respecting house, is not suitable; and there arose a great bitterness over the drops of paint, the smell in the room, and the wrongful displacement of the central table; for now Madeleine, typing at Mme. Roig’s, could not always be there to clean and to replace before one of her aunts or her mother got in.

Francisco took his easel to Collioure. His particular friends of the time had a very large attic where there was room for all to work, and there he took up his stand.

This was lonely for Madeleine, and when he took to sleeping there, it was more so. She did not tell her mother or anyone else – she would never have done so at any time, but now that she was so withdrawn from them it would have been even less possible: for she was withdrawn from them, although Francisco blamed her for being entirely on their side, not with him at all: that was the root of all their quarreling.

She said as she lay there alone, watching the light of the street lamp swinging madly on the ceiling as the gale of the equinox took it, she said that it was better to watch it and know that he was on dry land than to watch it and think of him at sea. She said this, but she was saying it against her knowledge – a knowledge that she would not formulate or allow to appear whole, but which grew so substantial and familiar in those last weeks that she was not surprised, not fundamentally surprised, however cruelly shocked she was, when she came home one day from Mme. Roig’s house and found Francisco pale and strange in the middle of his possessions, packing them – his only. He spoke as if he were drunk, but he was not drunk. He had meant to get out alone, unseen; he had not thought he would be disturbed, and when he saw her he was uncertain what attitude to take. He had not prepared one. There was a terrible embarrassment between them, as if they were naked in front of strangers.

He saw that she did not intend to scream or fight and asked her to find his blue suit.

She said ‘Have you got your best shirts?’

He said ‘I took them last week,’ and after a second he flushed an ugly dark color, because he had lain with her since then.

She said ‘Do you want this?’ It was her portrait that he had painted in the autumn. It was his best piece of work: it was framed. He said Yes, to put it by the other paintings stacked by the door; but he did not look and his voice was hardly recognizable.

They did not say anything more, and she went out of the room: she did not watch him pick up the load of things, the too-many parcels, bundles; go awkwardly out, down the stairs, put the things down, open the door, pick them up, and bolt out. His feet went sounding up the street, for he had shoes on; and in a minute the hollow wind slammed the door after him.

At the crossroads he jerked into the car, into the back seat, and the woman in front, after a glance at his face, started the engine and drove rapidly away on the white road of the coast.

He sat there in the back, abandoned to the movement of the car: he had never felt anything like this in his life. It was as if his whole being, the whole of the inside of his body, were bleeding, bleeding. The pain was something utterly beyond his experience.

It did not surprise him that his face was wet with tears: he leaned forward and let one roll on to the back of his hand.

What, what was he? A hero? Had he done something extremely brave? How terribly he was suffering: how terribly an artist must suffer. How shockingly wide is the range of an artist’s feelings, he thought, only an artist could suffer so much: and the tears rolled on.