Mayflower (Flor de mayo): A Tale of the Valencian Seashore

The people on the rocks were now in plain sight. Spray could be seen dashing over them, and occasionally their anguished voices even reached as far as the Mayflower's deck. Recristo! To be drowned like rats in a trap, under the very eyes of your folks, and they unable to help you! Dog of a sea! Pig of a wind! And the Rector, to vent his impotent fury, spat at the waves, as the vessel reared and plunged this way and that, the scuppers under, clear to the hatch, first to starboard and then to port, the cross-yard shoving its point under at every roll.

"Look out! Look out!"

Now the death blows were beginning to come.

A wave of gray water, noiseless, and without a cap, reared above the stern, came full aboard without breaking, covered the whole boat, sweeping over her like a cuff from a gigantic hand. The Rector received the shock square on the back, but nothing, apparently, could loosen his iron grip from the tiller, nor pry his feet from the deck against which they were braced. He felt the water get deeper and deeper above his head, and a terrible groaning as if the boat were going to pieces under the strain. Then, as he came to the surface, an object, driven along by the wave like a cannonball, just grazed him.

It was the water-cask. The great roller had torn it from its frame, and was hurling it along the deck, crushing everything before it. It brushed Pascualet in the face, and blood spurted from the boy's nostrils. Then, like a giant sledge-hammer, it hurtled forward toward the foot of the mast where tio Batiste and the two sailors were. It was all as instantaneous as it was terrible. There was a cry. In spite of his courage in the face of terror, Pascualo could not stand this horrifying sight. With a groan of agony he buried his face in his hands. Like a mighty catapult, the barrel caught the youngest of the sailors on the head, and crushed him to pulp against the mast; and then, like an assassin running away with blood streaming from his hands, the heavy keg rolled into the scupper and overboard. Eddies of water coming along the deck, swept the mangled headless torso against the hands and faces of the other men, and washed blood and bits of flesh around over the planking.

Tio Batiste, his faltering lament sounding faintly through the storm, began to protest despairingly. God, could it not soon be over! Why torment honest sailors so? They had done no harm! "Let her go, Pascualo, let her go, for God's sake! Our time has come! Why fight and make us suffer so long?" But the Rector was not listening. His eyes were on the mast, where he remembered hearing that terrible groaning sound, when he was under water. And, in fact, the pole had been fractured and was leaning alarmingly. At the peak he could still see the sheaf of grass that had been hung up there for the christening and the bunch of dry flowers that the hurricane was whipping about at the end of one last strand. "Pare!Pare!" Pascualet, his face covered with blood and terrified at the catastrophe he felt impending, was calling to his father to save him! But his father could do nothing. Keep her away from the worst one, perhaps, and prevent her from rolling over! As for doubling the Breakwater, he had given up hope of that!

And then … even the Rector gave a cry of terror.

The Mayflower was at the bottom of a great gully in the sea. From behind a huge roller of black shining water was curling; and a back-wave just as high was rushing the other way. The boat would be caught between them as they met.

It seemed minutes before it was over, though the crash was instantaneous. With a horrible crunching and wrenching of timber, the Mayflower went down into a great boiling cauldron; and when she came to the surface again, her deck was as level and clean as a scow's. The mast was off even with the flooring and had gone overboard, carrying sail, men and all. The Rector thought he saw the blanched face of tio Batiste looking up at him out of the water for a second. Then that had gone. It was about over now!

As the Mayflower came up dismantled and helpless from her terrific ordeal, the throng on the Breakwater gave one great groan of agony. "They're lost! They're lost!" The cry was audible even to the men on board!

With her sail all gone, the boat no longer answered her helm. But Pascualo by frantic pulling to and fro succeeded in keeping her from drifting sideways before the wind. A chance wave swept the Mayflower over the rocks off the Breakwater. She did not touch, however, but drifted by so close that the Rector could recognize faces in the throng. What anguish! Able to reach them almost with your hand, able to hear them speak, and yet to be doomed! In a second the jetty was far astern. They would strike on the bars off Nazaret, and perish in the sands there that had been the graveyard of so many boats!

Tonet, who had been quite dazed by the repeated buffets from the water taken aboard, seemed to come to himself suddenly as the boat approached the Breakwater. It was a vision of life that gleamed in the darkness of his despair. No! He did not want to die! He would fight and fight to the last gasp. In the alternative of certain drowning in the undertow off Nazaret or of taking a chance among the rocks on the Breakwater, he would take the chance. Hadn't he been famous as the best swimmer in the Cabañal?

On hands and knees, and at the risk of going overboard with the next wave, he crawled along from the rail to a hatch that had been torn off by a recent comber. He went down into the hold.

The Rector watched him contemptuously. No, he was not sorry he had gone out after all! It had been God's way of saving a good man from committing murder! In a few minutes he would perish with that traitor of a brother. As for Dolores, she might live! That would be the worst punishment for her! Was there a bigger fraud in the world than life? No – he knew what a cheat life was! Death, death was the only honest thing, the thing that keeps all its promises and never lies! Death and the treachery of the sea – two truths, the only two truths! For the sea lets a man rob her! She leads him on and on, till he loves her! And then, some fine day, crash! and it's over. And so on, from father to son, generation after generation!

Such thoughts passed in instantaneous, successive flashes through the Rector's mind, as though the imminence of death were whetting his dull intelligence.

But, as Tonet's head came up through the hatch again, Pascualo jumped to his feet on the rolling deck, and uttered an exclamation of surprise. His brother had something in his hands. The life-preserver – the gift of siñá Tona to the Mayflower – which the Rector had laid away below and thereafter quite forgotten!

Tonet did not quaver at the stare of execration his brother gave him. "What are you going to do with that?" the Rector shouted.

"Going overboard! Every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost! Think I'm going to drown here like a rat in a trap? No, sir, I'm going to take a chance!"

"The devil you are! You die with me, right here, and even then I don't know that we'll be square!"

In that supreme crisis, Tonet became again the harbor rowdy of his early boyhood, the ragamuffin stranger to respect and consideration for other people. He smiled ferociously, cynically, back at his brother.

Pale with hatred, the two men faced each other.

"Pare!Pare!" Pascualet again called faintly, tugging weakly at the lash that held him to the deck.

The Rector remembered that the child was there. Lowering, silent, grim, he let go the tiller, drew his knife from his belt, and cut the sash about the little fellow's waist.

"And now" … he said, "that life-belt!"

But Tonet made an obscene gesture, and started to put the jacket on.

"You dog!" Pascualo cried. "I must speak, at last, tell you what I think of you, in just two words! You thought you had fooled me! But it was you I chased last night through the streets of the village. You had been with that foul woman ashore there! I am not going to kill you, because we're going to die together. But this boy here – I used to call him my Pascualet – is not to blame. And I'm not going to let him die. He may get drowned, and that would be almost better for him! But he must have what chance there is! That life-belt, Tonet! For your own boy, the child of your treachery and disgrace! You're a dog, but you are also a father! Hand it over, or I'll cut your throat!"

Tonet smiled an atrocious, cynical smile.

"I don't say he's not mine. But it's everybody for himself!"

He had the life-belt almost on, but he was not quick enough to finish. His brother was upon him. There was a quick desperate struggle on that pitching, rolling, wave-washed deck.

Tonet fell on his back. Pascualo had sunk the knife twice into his side. The Rector's thirst for vengeance had been assuaged!

Blind, not knowing what he was about, he adjusted the life-belt to the boy's tiny form, picked him up like a bundle of laths, walked astern, and threw him overboard. He saw him floating there for a second, till the crest of a great wave caught him.

It had all been the matter of minutes. The crowd on the point of the Breakwater saw the Mayflower drifting off entirely at the mercy of the storm. The rain suddenly had ceased, and the lightning-flashes were more distant now, though the gale still held furious, and the waves were coming even higher than before. The sailors could not tell, quite, what was going on on deck; but they saw the Rector throw a large bundle into the breakers, that lifted it up, and began to toss it shoreward, toward the rocks.

There was one last cry of horror.

The Mayflower had been caught abeam by a huge breaker, and was being turned end over end. She was seen for a second, bottom up, and then she sank, out of sight.

The women crossed themselves. Strong hands laid hold on siñá Tona and Dolores, to keep them from leaping into the sea.

Everybody had guessed what that bundle was, floating out there toward the shore. "The boy! The boy!" The sailors could see him now in the life-belt. But he would be smashed against the stones. The two women were screaming for help, though not knowing how it should come nor from whom. Could not the child at least be saved! "The boy! The boy!"

A young man volunteered. To his sash he tied a line held in the hands of the men on shore. He jumped down to the low-lying rocks, and then farther out still, into the water. And he held himself there, against the boiling wash, by sheer strength and adroitness.

The little body came shoreward. It was thrown up against a sharp crag and then, to the dismay of the throng, torn loose by another wave.

At last the sailor got hold of it, as a breaker was about to dash it headlong against the wall.

Poor Pascualet! He was laid out on the muddy top of the Breakwater, his face covered with blood, his arms and legs cold and blue, the flesh cut and torn by the sharp edges of the rocks, his tiny form projecting from the big life-belt like a turtle from its shell. Siñá Tona tried to warm in her hands the little head whose eyes were closed forever. Dolores was kneeling at his side, digging her nails into her face, pulling frantically at her luxuriant beautiful hair, her eyes, of the glints of gold, rolling vacantly, wildly, in all directions, while piercing screams went out into space.

"Fill meu!Fill meu!"

To one side, in the crowd of weeping women, Rosario stood, the deserted, the childless wife, tearful in the presence of that anguished motherhood; and from the bottom of her soul she forgave her rival.

And on a rock, there, above them all, indomitable in the face of sorrow, proud and erect as Vengeance herself, towered the massive bony frame of tia Picores, her skirts lashing like pennons in the hurricane.

Her back was turned contemptuously toward the sea and the clenched fist she raised was menacing some one way off on shore there, where the Miguelete raised its sturdy mass above the housetops of Valencia.

That was the real killer of poor folks, there the real author of the catastrophe! And the sea-witch shook her rough deformed knuckles at the city, while streams of obscenities flowed from her cavernous mouth.

"And after this they'll come to the Fishmarket, the harlots, and beat you down, and beat you down! And still they'll say fish comes high, the scullions! And cheap 't would be at fifty, yes, at seventy-five a pound!.."

THE END