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“Now then; now, now!”
    Her mother never shook her, but she nodded when Thérèse did, and when the man of the house was there during one of these scoldings she would say, “It is only your father’s goodness of heart that prevents him from beating you,” in a voice directed as much at Jean as at Madeleine.
    Dominique was becoming seriously worried now, and she longed for the time when the young fellow should be taken away for his military service, far away, to the other end of the world for preference, and for a long, long time. But although Francisco grew taller every day, and looked more and more like a full-grown man, capable of any mischief—Dominique’s clients already assured her that he was better at making Sunday-children than catching fish—his class was still far from being called. And daily, as he grew, he appeared more and more undesirable in her eyes. He had already earned a bad reputation among the fishermen as a lazy fellow, a passenger, and if the crew of the Amphitrite had not been afraid of old Camairerrou, Francisco would have been on the beach after a few weeks’ trial. They did not like him. It was not merely that he was backward in hauling on the nets, waiting to be told what to do instead of being there in front of the word like another boy; it was not that when it came to picking up the great skeins of sun-dried nets at midday Francisco was not to be found; it was not merely the usual complaints against idleness and inefficiency; it was worse than that. He brought them bad luck. There was no doubt that some man or some thing did. The season’s fishing, the long, long hours of night at sea, the wet cold, the interminable pulling on the heavy sweeps when a dead calm fell, all the hardships they had undergone, did not bring them in enough to live the winter through. Not enough, that is, for the married men: old savages like Camairerrou or El Turrut would hibernate, staying in bed for days on end with three loaves and a jug of wine, emerging from time to time to fish from the shore with a rod or to indulge in a night’s smuggling over the border. The others, once they had looked to their vineyards, would have to find work, either day-laboring or as stevedores at Port-Vendres when the Spanish schooners came up with oranges.
    Somebody had brought them bad luck; for nearly all the other boats had made enough for the whole year round, and their crews would spend the winter repairing their gear, pottering about with a calking-iron and a pot of paint, preparing for the spring: somebody had brought them bad luck, and it was certainly Francisco. Not only was he unhandy and awkward, the sort of person who smelt of bad luck, but once he had hurried on board, hot from the firemen’s ball, still prinked out in collar and tie, and wearing shoes . In a gloomy silence they had thrown them into the sea: but what was that feeble act against such an omen? How much could a pair of shoes propitiate? Very little: and bad was all their fishing, very bad.
    The autumns, then, took Francisco away; but they did not take him far, only along the coast to Port-Vendres one year, and to Collioure another. There he made friends with a Swedish painter and came home with a box of colors and a parcel of brushes, filled with enthusiasm for the new way of painting. He had never given up drawing or painting little water colors since he left school, and now that he showed himself in Saint-Féliu with easel and canvas in the grand manner the people took it very calmly. They did not think much of his new way of painting; they had never thought much of his former manner—painstaking representation—for he had never had the trick of taking likenesses, which alone they admired; but they tolerated him. There are countries where it would not be permissible for a young fisherman to take up his stand and paint a street in public; the youths of his own age would not allow it for a moment, the little boys would stone him and even the dogs