![The Cabin [La barraca] - Vicente Blasco Ibanez](/cover_944167.jpg "The Cabin [La barraca] - Vicente Blasco Ibanez")
down, threw himself face forward, crawling upon his belly as he spied through the cane-brake like a Bedouin in ambush. After a few minutes, he began to run again, and was soon lost to sight amid the labyrinth of paths, each of which led off to a different barraca, to a field where bending figures wielded large steel hoes, which glittered as the light struck upon them.
The huerta lay smiling and rustling, filled with whisperings and with light, drowsy under the cascade of gold reflected from the morning sun.
But soon there came, from the distance, the mingled sound of cries and halloes. The news passed on from field to field. With loud shouts, with a trembling of alarm, of surprise, of indignation, it ran on through all the plain as though centuries had not elapsed, and the report were being spread that an Algerian galley was about to land upon the beach, seeking a cargo of white flesh.
II
AT harvest time, when old Barret gazed at the various plots into which his fields were divided, he was unable to restrain a feeling of pride. As he gazed upon the tall wheat, the cabbage-heads with their hearts of fleecy lace, the melons showing their green backs on a level with the earth, the pimentoes and tomatoes, half-hidden by their foliage, he praised the goodness of the earth as well as the efforts of all his ancestors for working these fields better than the rest of the huerta.
All the blood of his forefathers was here. Five or six generations of Barrets had passed their lives working this same soil. They had turned it over and over, taking care that its vital nourishment should not decrease, combing and caressing it with ploughshare and hoe; there was not one of these fields which had not been watered by the sweat and blood of the family.
The farmer loved his wife dearly, and even forgave her the folly of having given him four daughters and no son, to help him in his work. Not that he loved his daughters any the less, angels sent from God who passed the day singing and sewing at the door of their farm-house, and who sometimes went out into the fields in order to give their poor father a little rest. But the supreme passion of old Barret, the love of all his loves, was the land upon which the silent and monotonous history of his family had unrolled.
Many years ago, many indeed, in those days when old Tomba, an aged man now nearly blind, who took care of the poor herd of a butcher at Alboraya, went roaming about in the band of The Friar,[C] shooting at the French, these lands had belonged to the monks of San Miguel de los Reyes.
They were good, stout gentlemen, sleek and voluble, who were not in a hurry to collect their rentals, and appeared to be satisfied if when they passed the cabin of an evening, the grand-mother, who was a generous soul, would treat them to deep cups of chocolate, and the first fruits of the season. Before, long before, the owner of all this land had been a great lord, who upon dying, had unloaded both his sins and his estates upon the bosom of the community. Now, alas! they belonged to Don Salvador, a little, dried-up old man of Valencia, who so tormented old Barret, that he even dreamed of him at night.
The poor farmer kept his trouble hidden from his family. He was a courageous man of clean habits. If he went to the tavern of Copa for a while on Sundays, when all the people of the neighbourhood were gathered there together, it was in order to watch the card-players, to laugh heartily at the absurdities and brutalities of Pimentó, and the other strapping young fellows who played "cock o' the walk" about the huerta; but never did he approach a counter to buy a glass; he always kept his sash-purse tight around the waist, and if he drank at all, it was only when one of the winners was treating all the crowd.
Averse to discussing his difficulties, he always seemed to be smiling, good-natured and calm, with the blue cap which had won for him his nickname,[D] pulled well down over his ears.
He worked from daylight until dusk. While the rest of the huerta still slept, he tilled his fields in the uncertain light of dawn, but more and more convinced, all the time, that he could not go on working them alone.
It was too great a burden for one man. If he only had a son! When he sought aid, he took on servants who robbed him, worked but little, and whom he discharged when he surprised them asleep in the stable during the sunny hours.
Obsessed with his respect for his ancestors, he would rather have died in his fields, overcome by fatigue, than rent a single acre to strange hands. And since he could not manage all the work alone, half of his fertile land remained fallow and unproductive, while he tried to maintain his family and pay off his landlord by the cultivation of the other half.
A silent struggle was this, desperate and obstinate, to earn enough for the necessities of life and overcome the ebbing of his vitality.
He now had only one wish. It was that his little girls should not know; that no one should give them an inkling of the worries and troubles which harassed their father; that the sacred joy of this household, the joy enlivened at all hours by the songs and laughter of the four sisters, who had been born in four successive years, should not be broken.
And they, in the meantime, had already begun to attract the attention of the young swains of the huerta, when they went to the merrymakings of the village in their new and showy silk handkerchiefs and their rustling ironed skirts. And while they were getting up at dawn and slipping off barefooted in their chemises in order to look down, through the cracks of the little windows, at the suitors who were singing the albaes,[E] or who wooed them with thrummings of the guitar, poor old Barret, trying harder and harder to balance his accounts, drew out ounce by ounce the handful of gold which his father had amassed for him farthing by farthing, and tried in vain to appease Don Salvador, the old miser who never had enough, and who, not content with squeezing him, kept talking of the bad times, the scandalous increase in taxes, and the need of raising his rent.
Barret could not possibly have had a worse landlord. He bore a detestable reputation throughout the entire huerta, since there was hardly a district where he did not own property. Every evening he passed over the roads, visiting his tenants, wrapped up even in springtime in his old cloak, shabby and looking like a beggar, while maledictions and hostile gestures followed after him. It was the tenacity of avarice which desired to be in contact with its property at all hours; the persistency of the usurer, who has pending accounts to settle.
The dogs howled from a distance when they saw him, as though Death itself were approaching; the children looked after him with frowning faces; men hid themselves in order to avoid painful excuses, and the women came to meet him at the door of the cabin with their eyes upon the ground and the lie ready to entreat him to be patient, while they answered his blustering threats with tears.
Pimentó who, as the public bully, interested himself in the misfortunes of his neighbours, and who was the knight-errant of the huerta, muttered something through his teeth which sounded like the promise of a thrashing, with a cooling-off later in a canal. But the very victims of the miser held him back, telling him of the influence of Don Salvador, warning him that he was a man who spent his mornings in court and had powerful friends. With such, the poor are always losers.
Of all his tenants, the best was Barret, who at the cost of great effort owed him nothing at all. And the old miser, even while pointing him out as a model to the other tenants, carried his cruelty toward him to the utmost extreme. Aroused by the very meekness of the farmer he showed himself more exacting, and was evidently pleased to find a man upon whom he could vent without fear all his instincts of robbery and oppression.
Finally he raised the rent of the land. Barret protested, even wept as he recited to him the merits of the family who had worked the skin from their hands in order to make these fields
