The Catalans: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

dirty (when she was a little girl), untruthful, and dishonest. But being less battered, she was less dirty, untruthful, and dishonest than the rest. Certainly she was less irritating, for not only was she endowed with a happy, affectionate nature, but also with a mother who was protected from the smaller vexations of the world by well-ordered nerves and a high degree of mental calm: for in the matter of irritation, it is essential that there should be two people present; the worst-bred ape of a child cannot be irritating alone in a howling wilderness, and Madeleine, even at her worst, could not provoke a mother removed by a boundless expanse of absence, sitting at her counter or leaning on it, with her eyes round, wide open, and fixed upon nothing, nothing whatever.
    But still, kind though Dominique was, her kindness recognized a vast difference between those who belonged to her family and those who did not; and now that Madeleine was growing older—old enough now that no one could possibly mistake her for a boy—she looked at Francisco, and wished that her daughter had chosen some other man’s son to appropriate.
    The thought was no sooner clear in her mind than she spoke it: this was her way, and unless she were in one of her moods of abstraction it was rare that she let out a breath without some words upon it. It was her comfort to talk: the greater part of her life was passed in a haze of words, and if she had been prevented from talking with her customers, with her neighbors if there were nobody in the shop, or with herself if she were kept in alone by her duties, if she had been cut off from that delight, she would have pined clean away. Without her little gossip, she owned, she would never get through her day; and the life of a small shopkeeper in Saint-Féliu was no slight affair: she was up before it was light in the winter to meet the lorry that brought the milk, and already there would be customers waiting; then from that time she would not shut the door until ten o’clock on an early evening or eleven on a late one. This she did seven days a week for the whole year round. In some manner, too, between opening and closing the door, she fed her family and did her housework, besides selling salt cod, chick-peas, haricots, chicory, wreaths of garlic, bowls, glasses, soap, oil, wine, cheese, peaches, apricots, persimmons, melons, figs, medlars, all the fruit of their garden, all their vegetables, and brooms, sulphur candles, votive candles, ordinary candles, and a hundred other things beyond the list. This was in addition to collecting, arranging, and weighing every scrap of information about the private lives of all the families in the town, collating it with former knowledge and passing it on in a better form.
    She had a little help from her husband in the evenings with the accounts, but he worked nearly as many hours as she did, with the market-garden, the two vineyards, and the insurance-collecting that kept him so much from home, and she could be said to run the shop singlehanded. There was, of course, her sister-in-law next door, who had not half the custom, nor a quarter, and who would spend the most part of her day as often as not in measuring out the rice or sugar, or in preparing the lunch while Dominique satisfied the customers. There was also Mimi from the tobacco shop down on the corner of the street; when her husband was not at sea she would leave the shop in his charge and come to help at the busy time of day, for the shop, Dominique’s shop, was the ancestral place of trade, and they all felt a particular loyalty toward it.
    But this is not directly concerned with her thought about Francisco. The only person in the shop at the time of Domini que’s thought was an old woman who came down from Ayguafret in the mountains and carried back her provisions in a donkey cart.
    “It will be all right when he goes away for his military service,” said Dominique.
    The old woman was deaf; she replied that she