Into her passion for the soldier she put all the vehemence of a woman whose youth is sloping toward sunset, and she paraded her joy in bold indifference to what people were saying. Let them talk! Let them talk till their tongues wore out! Many women were worse than she was. Of course the girls were sore at her carrying off a good-looking fellow right under their noses!
Martinez, for his part, with the usual dreamy expression on his face, let himself be kissed and pampered as though he deserved every bit of it; besides his prestige had gone up not only in his squad but with his superiors. Why not, with a boat full of the real stuff, not to mention that stocking crammed with silver duros that sometimes stuck into his ribs as he lay down on the bed in the stateroom! To make sleeping more comfortable he removed that annoying obstruction, and siñá Tona said not a word. Was he not to be her husband? The money was all hers, and so long as the tavern paid as well as it was paying, there was no need to worry.
In four or five months, however, Tona began to go around with a long face. See here, Martinez, siñor Martines, just come down out of the clouds and listen to Tona for a moment. Tona is saying something to you. She is saying that something must be done, in the circumstances. The present situation cannot last. A satisfactory explanation must be ready for what is bound to occur. A respectable mother of two children cannot be the respectable mother of three children, without a man there to step forward and say: "This is mine!"
And Martinez said: "Bueno!", but there was a sign of annoyed surprise in the way he said it, as though he had suddenly bumped against some hard reality in his plunge from the ideal heights where he always dwelt as a man unappreciated by the world, and where he could dream at leisure of becoming a general, a Dictator, and all the other things the heroes of Perez Escrich become, in that imaginative writer's novels!
Yes, he would send for the certificates necessary for the marriage license. But it would take time of course, because Huelva was a long way off. Tona waited, with her thoughts on Huelva, a city hazy in the distance, which she figured must be off around Cuba, or the Philippines, perhaps. And time went by, while the situation grew more and more alarming.
Martinez, siñor Martines, in two months … Tona cannot pretend any longer! People are noticing. What will the boys say when they find that they have a young brother? But Martinez got cross. It wasn't his fault, if the documents didn't come. She could see how many letters he kept writing.
Finally the patrolman announced one morning that there was no other way out of it. He would have to go and get those cursed papers himself, and he had secured leave of absence from his captain. Fine! Siñá Tona thought that was a good idea. She gave him all the money she had, sleeked his hair one last time, wept a little, and … "Good-by! And don't be long!"
A patrolman going by one day was kind enough to tell her the real truth. All that talk about going to Huelva was a lie. Martinez had been writing for papers all right, but to Madrid, asking to be transferred to another district at the opposite end of Spain, since the climate at Valencia was not good for him. And he had won his point. He had been assigned to the department of La Coruña.
That was a bad moment for siñá Tona. The thief! The bandit! You just trust these smooth talkers! So that was to be her pay for giving him her last cent – and combing his hair, the towhead, out there under the shed in the afternoon, as kind and soft-like as a mother.
But for all of Tona's desperation, in a few weeks she was handing out drinks across the counter while she nursed a white sickly girl baby, a tiny little thing with blue eyes and an over-sized yellow head that looked like a ball of gold.
CHAPTER II
SIÑÁ TONA'S FAMILY
And the years rolled on with nothing further to disturb the monotonous course of life for the family sheltered in the tavern-boat. The Rector had grown up to be a lusty sailor, stingy of words, fearless in danger. From gato de barca he had graduated to the rank of able-bodied seaman and was the man of the crew on whom tio Borrasca most relied. Every month Pascualet handed four or five duros over to his mother to keep for him.
Tonet was not settling down to any trade. A stubborn fight was going on between him and his mother. Tona would run her legs off finding him jobs which he would proceed to lose. For about a week he was apprentice to a cobbler. Then he went for a couple of months as "cat" on tio Borrasca's boat; and not even that stern disciplinarian was able to kick any obedience into him. Then he tried his hand at coopering, the steadiest of all trades; but his boss bounced him to the sidewalk in a very few days. Then he joined a stevedore's colla in town; but he never worked unloading the steamers more than two days a week, and that much quite against his will.
But his many shortcomings as vagrant and rowdy found easy excuse in siñá Tona's eyes, when she would see him of a holiday – and what days were not holidays for that rascal? – with that fluffy flat silk cap of his topping off a brown face with just the suggestion of a mustache showing, a blue denim coat fitting close to his figure, and a black silk sash wound around his waist over a flannel shirt with black and green checks. Any woman would be proud to own a boy like that! He was going to be another terror on the lines of that Martinez – curse the wretch – but with more "seasoning," more get-up-and-go, to him. To be sure of that, it was enough to watch the girls in the Cabañal when he was around. They would be willing to scratch each other's eyes out to get him for a lover! Tona was kept posted on all his adventures, and was immensely flattered at the boy's popularity and "social position." A bit too fond of brandy, yes – and what a pity! – but a regular fellow, quite different from that big good-natured booby of a Pascualet, who wouldn't say a word if a cart ran over him.
One Sunday evening in a tavern appositely labeled the "Inn of Good Morals," he began to throw bottles at some stevedores who had accepted a cut in wages; and when the police came in to restore order, they caught him, red-handed, chasing his enemies over the tops of the tables with his knife drawn. More than one week-end he spent in the jail at headquarters whence his mother's tears and the "pull" tio Mariano had as a politician and distributor of election money, would finally extricate him. And arrest proved so salutary to him that on the very night of one of his discharges he was taken again for drawing a knife on two English sailors, who, after a number of treats, tried to explain some of the details of the Marquis of Queensbury rules to him. Not much good at drudgery, but able to drink anybody under the table, and do it night after night, passing from dive to dive, and not showing his face at home for weeks at a time!
Tonet had an intimate way of conducting his more serious love-affairs that made many people suspect him of anticipating legal ceremonies. But his mother took no stock in such reports. She did not insist on a princess for her Tonet, but how could any one think he would ever marry that girl of tio Paella the truckman! Dolores, shameless hussy, was pretty enough, to be sure, but bound to make the woman who got her for a daughter-in-law lead a song – and a dance! What could you expect of a girl brought up without a mother by that tio Paella, a tippler who could never walk straight as he went out to hitch up at daylight, and who was getting thinner and thinner from alcohol, except for his nose that was growing so big it almost covered his puffy cheeks.
A tough customer was tio Paella, and no one said a good word for him. His trade was all in town, in the Fishmarket section of Valencia. When an English boat came in, he openly offered his services to take sailors to places only he knew about; and on summer nights he would load his wagon up with girls in white wrappers, with painted cheeks and flowers in their hair, and drive parties of men off with them to various resorts along the shore, where they would have one grand carousal till sunrise, while he sat off in a corner, his whip in one hand and a wine mug in the other, paternally chaperoning what, sacrilegiously, he called his "flock."
And he talked right out regardless of his girl's presence. The language he used to her was the language he used to the women he knew in town. When he was drunk he would
