The Catalans. Patrick O’Brian

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ