And who was this coming in his direction? Roseta had spied him, and deserting a party of girls, was tripping over toward him. Her companions were to wait for friends from another floor, and they might be some minutes in starting. Was he going home? All right! They would go together! Roseta hated just standing around!
They took the Grao road, Pascualo moving his sea-legs frantically to keep up with that devil of a girl who never walked but she ran, though with an attractive swaying of her body which made her skirt go up and down like the marking buoy in a yacht race. Shouldn't he carry her lunch-box for her? Thanks! She was used to having it on her arm. Didn't think she could walk so fast without it!
By the time they were at the Sea Bridge, the captain was on the subject of his boat, as usual. That Mayflower of his could even make him forget he had a Dolores and a Pascualet! The next morning the bòu-fishing began, and all the vessels would go out. "But she's queen of the lot! We hitched the oxen on to her yesterday, and now she's in the water, anchored with the other boats in the harbor. But there's no mistaking her, girl! She strikes your eye like a señorita in the middle of a bunch of beach-trailers!" He had been in town to get a few odds and ends still lacking to his equipment. Now he had a dollar to bet that not one of the rich men in the Cabañal, who sat around at home and got the best of every load of fish without lifting a finger, could show a craft half the witch the Mayflower was ... not half.
But the end which comes to everything in this world came also to the store of nice things the Rector had to say, in his enthusiasm, about his boat. By the time the pair had reached the bakery of Figuetes, Pascualo had lapsed into his normal taciturnity, and Roseta held the floor, dealing with the forewomen in the tobacco factory in terms that such cattle deserved.
"Work the life out of you, they do! It was all I could do to keep myself from waiting outside and pulling the topknot of that wench as she came out! I don't mind about myself so much. Mama and me can get along on nothing almost. But it's different with others of us. Why, some of those girls have to sweat like niggers, to feed some loafer of a husband, and a houseful of brats that wait at the door at night with their mouths wide open to swallow half the bread in town! What I don't see is how, in conditions like that, there's a woman left in the world who can laugh. For instance ..." And the golden-haired Diana, so insensible to the allurements of men, but reared withal among the filthy-mouthed ragamuffins of the seashore, struck an air of stern and serious modesty, and recounted in words of disconcerting directness, but with a rippling sweetness of tone that seemed to wipe the foulness of such language from her cheery lips, the story of a shopmate of hers at home with a broken arm, after a beating from her husband, who had caught her in flagrant wrong-doing with a friend of his! "I wouldn't call her much of a woman, I wouldn't!" and the virtuous Roseta pouted the pout of a virgin who knows all there is to know. "What a disgrace! And she had four children—four!"
The Rector smiled a ferocious smile. "So she got out of it with a broken arm, did she! I'd have broken her neck, I would! No half-way business with these women that don't know what belongs to their husband and what belongs to the other fellow! Imagine living with a thing like that! Thank God, I didn't draw one of that kind. I've got a good wife and a happy home!" "Yes, you can thank God, all right," Roseta assented with one of her smiles of compassionate contempt. But the Rector was not spry of wit. And the finer shadings of irony escaped him.
But as the simple-minded sailor walked along, he grew more and more excited at the outrageous conduct of that woman he didn't know and at the misfortune of that husband whose name he had never heard. "You know, a rotten business like that gets under my skin, it does. Here's an honest man breaking his back from morning till night to feed his woman and his boys and his girls, and comes home from the shop and finds my lady flouncing around with Mr. 'Friend'! God, girl! I'd cut the wench's throat, I would—if I swung for it! If you ask me, I say—well, whose fault is it? The women! Yes, the women! What was a woman ever put on this earth for, except to damn a man's soul! Diós! I never saw but two decent women, anyhow. One is Dolores, and the other is you!" For the Rector, when he talked so extensively, was inclined to go to extremes, and he felt this time that his sweeping denunciation needed that much qualification.
Though much good the concession did him! For his sister was now on ground where, from the long tirades of Siñá Tona, she could be counted quite expert. She talked passionately, with a tinge of irritation in her sweet vibrant voice. "Women, eh! Women! Not a bit of it! It's the men, I say, and I know what I'm talking about. Among the pigs in this world, the prize hog is the man! See trouble anywhere? Look and you'll find a man at the bottom of it. Mama says so, too. There are two kinds of men in this world—scamps and puddingheads! If a woman goes wrong, it's the man that's to blame. If she's not married they are all after her to get what they want ... and maybe I don't know that! If I was the fool some men take me for, God knows the fix I'd be in to-day! And if you are married, well, it's worse, almost—for the scamps try to get you into trouble, and the puddingheads haven't sense enough to keep their wives where they belong. Look at Tonet, for instance! Wouldn't Rosario be serving him right if she went on the street, even, to get square with him for all he does! And then, well, no! Stop at Tonet! We don't need to give other examples! But the whole Cabañal knows about husbands that are themselves to blame if their wives aren't all they ought to be!"
And the girl leered at the Rector so unguardedly, in saying this, that Pascualo, in spite of his corpulent obtuseness, caught the glimmer of an allusion and studied her face enquiringly. But his immense faith, at bottom, in people and in things stood him in good stead against any dangerous inference. And he protested, mildly, at her exaggeration. Bosh! People in the Cabañal made him sick! They were always talking about somebody, to pass the time. If you listened to what people said, there wasn't a decent woman in town, nor a husband that wasn't the joke of the beach. But that's only a way they had of amusing themselves. The Cabañal had no manners, as don Santiago, the curate, said so well! "Now, take me, for instance. I've got the best, sweetest wife in the world, and everybody knows it! Well, does that keep those fools from blabbing about her? And who's the man? Tonet, may it please the court! Tonet, of all men! The people in the Cabañal are donkeys, idiots, rotters, that's all! Tonet, God save us! Why, Tonet ... he worships Dolores, like a mother.... But no, my house has simply got to be a brothel, for those chatter-boxes.... Tonet! God!" And the Rector laughed one of those hearty laughs of pitying superiority at the stupidity of people, the kind of laugh the Spanish peasant gives when he hears some benighted ignoramus questioning the authenticity of the village Virgin's miracles.
Roseta stopped short in her tracks, sizing up the Rector with those dreamy sea-green eyes of hers. What did that laugh mean? Was Pascudo serious? Yes, without a doubt. As serious as a preacher! That puddinghead was proof-proof! And the certainty angered her. Instinctively, without reckoning the consequences of what she was doing, she came out with the charges that had been tickling her tongue for years! In short: two kinds of men, scamps and puddingheads! And a glance of hers stamped the second label upon her brother, as he, in fact, divined.