And summer was coming on. The stretch of seashore between the Gas House drain and the harbor, so solitary and deserted at other seasons of the year, was busily returning to life. The heat was beginning to drive the whole city to the water's side, where a veritable town of movable houses, like the temporary encampment of an army, was growing up. In a measured line along the sands ran the shacks of the vacationers, cheap structures with walls of painted canvas and roofs of cane, front doors labeled with fantastic names, and, to distinguish one camp from so many others like it, flag-staffs on the gables with banners of all colors, and above the flags, queer weathervanes—boats, dragons, dolls, gew-gaws of every shape and form. In a second line, farther from the shore, and speculating on the appetite that salt air awakens in dyspeptics, came the more pretentious and the more permanent structures of the restaurants and eating-places, with stairways and verandas, façades of ornate but inexpensive stucco, masking the frailty of such pomp under ostentatious names: The Paris Hotel and Restaurant, The Miramar, The Fonda del Buen Gusto; and between these pedants of summer-time gastronomy, the lunch-rooms of the natives, huts with roofs of matting, rickety tables with wine jugs in the center, and outdoor kitchens, dispensing shell-fish with vinegar dressing from Saint John's day till mid-September, under signs of delightfully capricious spelling: Salvaor and Neleta, wines, bears and likers.
Along the roads through this mushroom city, that vanished like a fog with the first gales of autumn, street and steam cars dashed full speed, whistling to scare you before they crushed you flat; or tartanas creaked along, their red curtains flapping like banners of pure joy; or crowds of people pressed their way, with the murmur of many, many voices. It was the humming of a bee-hive, varied with the calling of vendors, the thrumming of guitars, the nasal screaming of accordions, the clack-clack of castañets, the wailing of hand organs, all the kinds of noise that men with smoothed hair and soft white shirts can dance to, after internal baths with anything but water and preparatory to the return to town for a slashing or boxing fray with the first innocent policeman they come across.
The people of the sea, beyond the drain, watched the gathering of this annual invasion with interested eyes, but without taking part in all its jollity. Let them enjoy themselves—if they were willing to pay for it! All that merry-making was the source of the Cabañal's pin-money, for the other seasons of the year.
On the first of August the Rector's boat was, you might say, done. And what a beauty she was, come now, tell the truth and don't be envious! The proud owner spoke of his creation much as a grand-daddy sizes up a new baby in his son's family. "The timber? Well, did you ever see solider beams than hers! And look at the finish on that mast! Not a cross grain to it from deck to point! A bit thick amidships! But I wanted her like that—handles rough water better. But just take a peep at that bow of hers! Sharp enough to cut paper with! Black along the scuppers, but with a shine like the patent leather shoe of a Grandee of Spain; and the body of her, white, but smooth as an eel, and just as fast, by God, in the water!" The rigging, the fishing gear and other trappings, were not yet aboard. But the best tackle makers along shore were at work on them, and by the fifteenth, the whole trousseau would be ready, and, pretty as a bride on the way to church, would she take the water! All this and more, the Rector was saying one evening to the circle of neighbors who, as usual, were sitting around his door.
He had invited his mother and his sister Roseta to supper that night. Dolores was at his side. Some distance away, with his rope-seated chair tilted back against an olive tree, and looking up at the moon through the branches in the dreamy pose of a chromo troubadour, sat Tonet, picking at the strings of a mandolin. On the walk in front some fish were frying on a little earthen stove. A number of children, Pascualet among them, were chasing a dog about in the mud of the gutters. Groups were sitting in front of the other houses along the road, to get full benefit of the faint breeze that was blowing off the sea. Redeu! How people must have been stewing in Valencia that night!
Siñá Tona was getting very old. She had "taken her jump," as she put it. From comely buxomness she had passed abruptly into old age, and the raw bluish light of the moon made evident that the hair on her head had thinned, leaving a scant network of taut gray locks over her sunburned scalp. The wrinkles now sank deep into her emaciated face while her cheeks hung loose and baggy, and her black eyes, once the talk of the whole shore, peered sad and faded from the folds of skin that drooped about them. Old long before her time, and from heartbreak, mostly, the spite and the worry that men had given her! And this she said with a nod in Tonet's direction, but with her thoughts, almost certainly, on the guardsman who had long before betrayed her. Besides, times had been getting harder and harder! What the tavern now brought in was nothing, practically. Roseta had had to go to work in the tobacco factory in town; and every morning, with her lunch-box on her arm, she went off along the highway to Valencia, joining the bands of pretty, bold-faced girls who marched with tapping heels and swishing skirts to sneeze all day in the snuff-laden air of the Old Customs House. And what a girl Roseta had grown to be! Roseta was just the name for her! When her mother, sometimes, looked at her out of the corners of her eyes, she seemed to see in her all the florid exuberance of the handsome siñor Martines.
Even now, while complaining that her daughter would have to take the long walk on winter mornings, she could not help feasting her eyes on that head of tangled golden hair out there under the olive tree, those dreamy sea-green eyes, that white skin that neither sun nor wind could darken, flecked now by the shadows of the branches which the moon outlined in arabesques of light and shade on the girl's face. Roseta, with her air of a maiden who knows all there is to know, kept looking from Dolores to Tonet and from Tonet to Dolores. At the fulsome praises that Pascualo kept showering upon his brother—for drifting away from the waster's life he had been leading to spend more and more of his time in that house where he found a peaceful, homelike kindliness he had never known in his own—the young half-sister smiled sarcastically. Oh, these men, these men! Just as she and mama had always said! Either scamps like Tonet, or puddingheads, like the Rector. Men! She would have none of them! And the Cabañal could never make out why she refused every boy who proposed to her! She would never have one of the wretched animals kicking around between her feet. She had taken well to heart all the curses she had heard her mother heap on men in her bitterest moments of despair down there in the loneliness and gloom of the tavern-boat.
No one had spoken for some time. The fish continued sizzling in the frying-pan. Tonet was still picking disconnected chords from his mandolin. The band of youngsters playing in the street were staring up at the moon as though they had never seen it before, singing in cadenced monotone with silvery little voices:
La lluna, la pruna
Vestida de dol ...
"Eh, will you brats shut up!" Tonet protested, claiming that he had a headache. "You come and make us!" came the answering challenge: