Part 8

The determination of the father suddenly surged up in Roseta. Trembling, stammering with fury, and with bloodshot eyes, she dropped the pitcher, which broke into pieces drenching the nearest girls, who protested in a chorus, calling her a stupid creature. But she was in no mood to take notice of such things!

"My father ..." she cried, advancing toward the one who had insulted her. "My father a thief? Say that again and I will smash your face!"

But the dark-haired girl did not have to repeat it, for before she could open her lips, she received a blow in the mouth, and the fingers of Roseta fixed themselves in her hair. Instinctively, impelled by pain, she seized the blond hair of the mill-girl in turn, and for some time the two could be seen struggling together, bent over, pouring forth cries of pain and madness, with their foreheads almost touching the ground, dragged this way and that by the cruel tugs which each one gave to the head of the other. The hair-pins fell out, loosening the braids; the heavy heads of hair seemed like banners of war, not floating and victorious, but crumpled and torn by the hands of the opponent.

But Roseta, either stronger or more furious, succeeded in disengaging herself, and was going to drag her enemy to her, perhaps to give her a spanking, for she was trying to take off her slipper with her free hand, when there occurred an irritating, brutal, unheard-of scene.

Without any spoken agreement, as if all the hatred of their families, all the words and maledictions heard in their homes, had surged up in them at a bound, all threw themselves together upon the daughter of Batiste.

"Thief! Thief!"

In the twinkling of an eye, Roseta disappeared under the wrathful arms. Her face was covered with scratches; she was carried down by the shower of blows, though unable to fall, for the very crush of her enemies impeded her; but driven from one side to the other, she ended by rolling down head-long on the slippery stones, striking her forehead on an angle of the stone.

Blood! It was like the casting of a stone into a tree covered with sparrows. They flew away, all of them, running in different directions, with their pitchers on their heads, and in a short time no one could be seen in the vicinity of the fountain of the Queen but poor Roseta, who with loosened hair, skirts torn, face dirty with dust and blood, went crying home.

How her mother screamed when she saw her come in! How she protested upon being told of what had occurred! Those people were worse than Jews! Lord! Lord! Could such crimes occur in a land of Christians?

It was impossible to live. They had not done enough already with the men attacking poor Batiste, persecuting him and slandering him before the Tribunal, and imposing unjust fines upon him. Now here were these girls persecuting her poor Roseta, as though that unfortunate child had done anything wrong. And why was it all? Because they wished to earn a living and work, without offending anybody, as God commanded.

Batiste turned pale as he looked at his daughter. He took a few steps toward the road, looking at Pimentó's farm-house, whose roof stood out behind the canes.

But he stopped and finally began to reproach his daughter mildly. What had occurred would teach her not to go walking about the _huerta_. They must avoid all contact with others: live together and united in the farm-house and never leave these lands which were their life.

His enemies would take good care not to seek him out in his own home.

VI

A wasp-like buzzing, the murmur of a bee-hive, was what the dwellers in the _huerta_ heard as they passed before the Cadena mill by the road leading to the sea.

A thick curtain of poplar-trees closed in the little square formed by the road as it widened before the heap of old tiled roofs, cracked walls and small black windows of the mill, the latter an old and tumble-down structure erected over the canal and based on thick buttresses, between which poured the water's foaming cascade.

The slow, monotonous noise that seemed to issue from between the trees came from Don Joaquín's school, situated in a farm-house hidden by the row of poplar-trees.

Never was knowledge worse-lodged, though wisdom does not often, to be sure, dwell in palaces.

An old farm-house, with no other light than from the door and that which filtered in through the cracks of the roofs: the walls of doubtful whiteness, for the master's wife, a stout lady who lived in her rush-chair, passed the day listening to her husband and admiring him; a few benches, three grimy alphabets, torn at the ends, fastened to the wall with bits of chewed bread, and in the room adjoining the school some few old pieces of furniture which seemed to have knocked about half of Spain.

In the whole _barraca_ there was one new object: the long cane which the master kept behind the door and which he renewed every couple of days from the nearby cane-brake; it was very fortunate that the material was so cheap, for it was rapidly used up on the hard, close-clipped heads of those small savages.

Only three books could be seen in the school; the same primer served for all. Why should there be more? There reigned the Moorish method; sing-song and repetition, till with continual pounding you got things into their hard heads.

Hence from morning to night the old farm-house sent from its door a wearisome sing-song which all the birds of the neighbourhood made fun of.

"Our ... fa ... ther, who ... art ... in heaven."

"Holy ... Mary ..."

"Two times two ... fo ... up...."

And the sparrows, the linnets, and the calendar larks who fled from the youngsters when they saw them in a band on the roads, alighted with the greatest confidence on the nearest trees, and even hopped up and down with their springy little feet before the door of the school, laughing scandalously at their fierce enemies on seeing them thus caged up, under the threat of the rattan, condemned to gaze at them sideways, without moving, and repeating the same wearisome and unlovely song.

From time to time the chorus stilled and the voice of Don Joaquín rose majestically, pouring out his fund of knowledge in a stream.

"How many works of mercy are there?"

"Two times seven are how many?"

And rarely was he satisfied with the answers.

"You are a lot of dunces. You sit there listening as though I were talking Greek. And to think that I treat you with all courtesy, as in a city college, so you may learn good forms and know how to talk like persons of breeding!... In short, you have some one to imitate. But you are as rough and ignorant as your parents, who are also dishonest: they have money left to go to the tavern and they invent a thousand excuses to avoid giving me Saturdays the two coppers that are due me."

And he walked up and down indignant as he always was when he complained of the Saturday omissions. You could see it in his hair and in his figure, which seemed to be divided into two parts.

Below, his torn hempen-sandals always stained with mud: his old cloth trousers; his rough, scaly hands, which retained in the fissures of the skin the dirt of his little orchard, a square of garden-truck which he owned in front of the school-house, and many times this produce was all that went into his stew.

But from the waist upward his nobility was shown, "the dignity of the priest of knowledge," as he would say; that which distinguished him from all the population of the farm-houses, worms fastened to the glebe; a necktie of loud colours over his dirty shirt-front, a grey and bristly moustache, cutting his chubby and ruddy face, and a blue cap with an oilcloth visor, souvenir of one of the many positions he had filled in his chequered career.

This was what consoled him for his poverty; especially the necktie, which no one else in the whole district wore, and which he exhibited as a sign of supreme distinction, a species of golden fleece, as it were, of the _huerta_.

The people of the farm-houses respected Don Joaquín, though as regards the assistance of his poverty they were remiss and slothful. What that man had seen! How he had travelled over the world! Several times a railway employé; other times helping to collect taxes in the most remote provinces of Spain; it was even said that he had been a policeman in America. In short, he was a "somebody" in reduced circumstances.

"Don Joaquín," his stout wife would say, who was always the first to give him his title, "has never seen himself in the position he is in today; we are of a good family. Misfortune has brought us to this, but in our time we have made a mint of money."

And the gossips of the _huerta_, despite the fact that they sometimes forgot to send the two coppers for the instruction Saturdays, respected Don Joaquín as a superior being, reserving the right to make a little sport of his short jacket, which was green and had square tails; and which he wore on holidays, when he sang at high mass in the choir of Alboraya church.

Driven by poverty, he had landed there with his obese and flabby better-half as he might have landed anywhere else. He helped the secretary of the village with extra work; he prepared with herbs known only to himself certain brews which accomplished wonders in the farm-houses, where they all admitted that that old chap knew a lot; and without the title of schoolmaster, but with no fear that any one else would try to take away from him a school which did not bring in enough even to buy bread, he succeeded by much repetition and many canings, in teaching all the urchins of five or ten, who on holidays threw stones at the birds, stole fruit, and chased the dogs on the roads of the _huerta_, to spell and to keep quiet.

Where had the master come from? All the wives of the neighbours knew, from beyond the _churrería_. And vainly were further explanations asked, for as far as the geography of the _huerta_ was concerned, all those who do not speak Valencian are of the _churrería_.

Don Joaquín had no small difficulty in making his pupils understand him and preventing them from being afraid of Castilian. There were some who had been two months in school and who opened their eyes wide and scratched the backs of their heads without understanding what the master who used words never heard before in his school said to them.

How the good man suffered! He who attributed all the triumphs of his teaching to his refinement, to his distinction of manners, to his use of good language, as his wife declared!

Every word which his pupils pronounced badly (and they did not pronounce one well), made him groan and raise his hands indignantly till they touched the smoky ceiling of his school-house. Nevertheless he was proud of the urbanity with which he treated his pupils.

"You should look upon this humble school-house," he would say to the twenty youngsters who crowded and pushed one another on the narrow benches, listening to him half-bored and half-afraid of his rattan, "as a temple of courtesy and good-breeding. Temple, did I say? It is the torch that shines and dissolves the barbaric darkness of this _huerta_. Without me, what would you be? Beasts, and pardon me the word; the same as your worthy fathers whom I do not wish to offend! But with God's aid you must leave here educated, able to present yourselves anywhere, since you have had the good fortune to find a master like me. Isn't that so?"

And the boys replied with furious noddings, some knocking their heads against their neighbours' heads; and even his wife, moved by the temple and the torch, stopped knitting her stocking and pushed back the rush-chair to envelop her husband in a glance of admiration.

He would question all the band of dirty urchins whose feet were bare and whose shirt-tails were in the air, with astonishing courtesy:

"Let's see, Señor de Lopis; rise."

And Señor de Lopis, a mucker of seven with short knee trousers held up by one suspender, tumbled off his bench and stood at attention before the master, gazing askance at the terrible cane.

"For some time, I've been watching you picking your nose and making little balls of it. An ugly habit, Señor de Lopis. Believe your master. I will let it pass this time because you are industrious and know your multiplication table; but knowledge is nothing when good-breeding is lacking; don't forget that, Señor de Lopis."

And the boy who made the little balls agreed with everything, overjoyed to get off without a caning. But another big boy who sat beside him on the bench and who must have been nourishing some old grudge, seeing him standing, gave him a treacherous pinch.

"Oh, oh, master!" cried the boy. "'_'Orse-face_' pinched me!"

What was not Don Joaquín's indignation? What most excited his anger was the fondness the boys had for calling each other by their father's nicknames and even for inventing new ones.

"Who is '_'Orse_-Face'? Señor de Peris, you probably mean. What mode of address is that, great heavens! One would think you were in a drinking-house! If at least you had said _Horse_-Face! Wear yourself out teaching such idiots! Brutes!"

And raising his cane, he began to distribute resounding blows to each; to the one for the pinch and to the other for the "impropriety of language," as Don Joaquín expressed it, without stopping his whacks. And his blows were so blind that the other boys on the benches shrank together, each one hiding his head on his neighbour's shoulder; and one little fellow, the younger son of Batiste, frightened by the noise of the cane, had a movement of the bowels.

This appeased the master, made him recover his lost majesty, while the well-thrashed audience picked their noses.

"Doña Pepa," he said to his wife, "take Señor de Borrull away, for he is ill, and clean him after school."

And the old woman, who had a certain consideration for the three sons of Batiste, because they paid her husband every Saturday, seized the hand of _Señor de Borrull_, who left the school walking unsteadily on his weak little legs, still weeping with fear, and showing somewhat more than his shirttail through the rear-opening of his trousers.

These incidents concluded, the lesson-chanting was continued, and the grove trembled with displeasure, its monotonous whisper filtering through the foliage.

Sometimes a melancholy sound of bells was heard and the whole school was filled with joy. It was the flock of old Tomba approaching; all knew that when the old man arrived with his flock, there were always a couple of hours of freedom.

If the shepherd was talkative, the master was no whit behind him; both launched out on an interminable conversation, while the pupils left the benches and came close to listen, or slipping quietly away, went to play with the sheep who were grazing on the grass of the nearby slopes.

Don Joaquín liked the old man. He had seen the world, showed him the respect of speaking to him in Castilian, had a knowledge of medicinal herbs, and yet did not take from him his own customers; in short, he was the only person in the _huerta_ worthy of enjoying friendly relations with him.

His appearance was always attended by the same circumstances. First the sheep arrived at the school-door, stuck their heads in, sniffed curiously and withdrew with a certain contempt, convinced that there was no food here other than intellectual, and that of small value; afterwards old Tomba appeared walking along confidently in this well-known region, holding his shepherd's crook, the only aid of his failing sight, in front of him.

He would sit down on the brick bench next to the master's door, and there the master and the shepherd would talk, silently admired by Doña Josefa and the bigger boys of the school, who would approach slowly and form a group around them.

Old Tomba, who would even talk with his sheep along the roads, spoke slowly at first like a man who fears to reveal his limitations, but the chat of the master would give him courage and soon he would plunge into the vast sea of his eternal stories. He would lament over the bad state of Spain, over what those who came from Valencia said in the _huerta_, over bad governments in general which are to blame for bad harvests, and he always would end by repeating the same thing:

"Those times, Don Joaquín, those times of mine were different. You did not know them, but your own were better than these. It's getting worse and worse. Just think what all these youngsters will see when they are men!"

This was always the introduction of his story.

"If you had only seen the followers of the Fliar!" (The shepherd could never say friar.) "_They_ were true Spaniards; now there are only boasters in Copa's tavern. I was eighteen years old; I had a helmet with a copper eagle which I took from a dead man, and a gun bigger than myself. And the Fliar!... What a man! They talk now of General So-and-So. Lies, all lies! Where Father Nevot was, there was no one else! You should have seen him with his cassock tucked up, on his nag, with his curved sabre and pistols! How we galloped! Sometimes here, sometimes in Alicante-province, then near Albacete: they were always at our heels; but we made mince-meat of every Frenchman we caught. It seems to me I can see them still: _musiu_ ... mercy! and I, slash, slash, and a clean bayonet-thrust!"

And the wrinkled old man grew bolder and rose; his dim eyes shone like dull embers and he brandished his shepherd's staff as though he were still piercing the enemy with his bayonet. Then came the advice; behind the kind old fellow there arose a man all fierceness, with a hard, relentless heart, the product of a war to the death. His fierce instincts appeared, instincts which had, as it were, become petrified in his youth, and thus made impervious to the flight of time. He addressed the boys in Valencian, sharing with them the fruit of his experience. They must believe what he told them, for he had seen much. In life, patience to take revenge upon the enemy; to wait for the ball, and when it comes, to hit it hard. And as he gave these counsels, he winked his eyes, which in the hollows of the deep sockets seemed like dying stars on the point of flickering out. He related with senile malice a past of struggles in the _huerta_, a past of ambuscades and stratagems, and of complete contempt for the life of one's fellow-beings.

The master, fearing the moral effect of this on his pupils, would divert the course of the conversation, speaking of France, which was old Tomba's greatest memory.

It was an hour-long topic. He knew that country as well as though he had been born there. When Valencia surrendered to Marshal Suchet, he had been taken prisoner with several thousand more to a great city--Toulouse. And he intermingled in the conversation the horribly mutilated French words which he still remembered after so many years. What a country! There men went about with white plush hats, coloured coats with collars reaching up to the back of their heads, high boots like riding-boots; and the women with skirts like flute-sheaths, so narrow that they showed all they encased; and so he went on talking of the costumes and customs of the time of the Empire, imagining that it all still continued and that France of today was as it was at the beginning of the century.

And while he related in detail all his recollections, the master and his wife listened attentively, and some of the boys, profiting by the unexpected recess, slipped away from the school-house, attracted by the sheep, who fled from them as from the devil in person. For they pulled their tails and grabbed them by the legs, forcing them to walk on their fore-feet, and they sent them rolling down the slopes or tried to mount on their dirty fleece; the poor creatures protested with gentle bleatings in vain, for the shepherd did not hear them, absorbed as he was in telling with great relish of the agony of the last Frenchman who had died.

"And how many fell?" the master would ask at the end of the story.

"A matter of a hundred and twenty or thirty. I don't remember exactly."

And the husband and wife would exchange a smile. Since the last time the total had risen by twenty. As the years passed, his deeds of prowess and the number of victims increased.

The lamentations of the flock would attract the master's attention.

"Gentlemen," he would call out to the rash youths as he reached for his rattan, "come here, all of you. Do you imagine you can spend the day enjoying yourself? This is the place for work."

And to demonstrate this by example, he would brandish his cane so that it was a delight to see it driving back all the flock of playful youngsters into the sheep-fold of knowledge with blows.

"With your leave, Uncle Tomba: we've been talking over two hours. I must go on with the lesson."

And while the shepherd, courteously dismissed, guided his sheep toward the mill to repeat his stories there, there began once again in the school the chant of the multiplication-table which was Don Joaquín's great symbol of learning.

At sunset, the boys sang their last song, thanking the Lord "because He had helped them with His light," and each one took up again his dinner-bag. As the distances in the _huerta_ were not small, the youngsters would leave their homes in the morning with provisions enough to pass the whole day in school; and the enemies of Don Joaquín even said that one of his favourite punishments was to take away their rations in order thus to supplement the deficiencies of Doña Pepa's cooking.

Fridays, when school was out, the pupils invariably heard the same oration.

"Gentlemen: tomorrow is Saturday: remind your mothers and tell them that the one who does not bring his two coppers won't be let into the school. I tell you this particularly, Mr. de ... So and So, and you, Mr. de ... So and So" (and he would enumerate about a dozen names). "For three weeks now you have not brought the sum agreed upon, and if this goes on, it will prove that instruction is impossible, and learning impotent to combat the innate barbarity of these rustic regions. I contribute everything: my erudition, my books" (and he would glance at the three primer-charts, which his wife picked up carefully to put them away in the old bureau), "and you contribute nothing. Well, what I said, I said: Any one who comes tomorrow empty-handed will not pass that threshold. Notify your mothers."

The boys would form in couples, holding each other's hands (the same as in the schools of Valencia; what do you suppose?), and depart, after kissing the horny hand of Don Joaquín and repeating glibly as they passed near him:

"Good-bye, until tomorrow, by God's grace."

The master would accompany them to the little mill-square which was as a star for roads and paths; and there the formation was broken up into small groups and dispersed over different sections of the plain.

"Take care, my masters, I've got an eye on you," cried Don Joaquín as a last warning. "Look out when you steal fruit, throw stones or jump over canals. I have a little bird who tells me everything and if tomorrow I hear anything bad, my rattan will play the very deuce with you."

And standing in the little square, he followed with his gaze the largest group which was departing up the Alboraya road.

These paid the best. Among them walked the three sons of Batiste, for whom many a time the road had been turned into a way of suffering.

Hand in hand the three tried to follow the other boys, who because they lived in the farm-house next to old Batiste, felt the same hatred as their fathers for him and for his family and never lost an opportunity to torment them.

The two elder ones knew how to defend themselves, and with a scratch more or less even came out victorious at times.