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Updated: June 11, 2025
"But let us not waste words; order, method, and clarity! Above all let us write practically. Lack of practical character is our ruination." Finally he came to the Popess Juana, that imposing señora, whom Pablo Valls had only seen at a distance, as he seemed to her the personification of all the revolutionary impieties and of all the sins of his race. "There is no hope for you in that direction."
The things which would end this situation were the culture of the people, new customs, and this would be the work of years, and would not be accomplished by a marriage. Besides, experiments were dangerous and caused victims. If Jaime were eager to make the test let him choose someone besides his niece. Valls smiled sarcastically on seeing Jaime's negative gestures.
The history of the race on the island Valls condensed after his fashion into brief words. The Jews were many, very many in former times. Nearly all the commerce was in their hands; most of the ships were theirs. The Febrers, and other Christian potentates, had no objection to being their associates.
Valls was holding one of his hands, gazing at him affectionately with his amber pupils. He could no longer doubt; it was reality! He detected the odor of English tobacco, which always seemed to float around his mouth and beard. Was it not then an illusion? Had he really seen him in the course of his delirium? Was it his actual voice which he had heard in the midst of his nightmares?
First a long statement of the properties still possessed by Jaime at the time of his leaving Majorca, burdened with all manner of incumbrances and mortgages; then a list of his creditors, which was longer than that of his properties, followed by lists of interest due and other obligations, an entangled skein in which Febrer's mind became wholly confused, but through which Valls made direct headway, with the confidence of those of his race for disentangling jumbled business affairs.
When he insisted upon being a sailor, his father, the elder Valls, originator of the fortune of the house, had shipped him in a galley of his own which freighted sugar from Havana, but that was not a sailor's life because the cook reserved the best dishes for him; the captain dared not give him an order, seeing in him the son of the ship-owner.
Margalida, after contemplating Jaime with loving eyes, which still held something of timidity, went into the house to prepare the morning meal. The two men remained long in silence. Valls had taken out his pipe, filling it with English tobacco, and expelling fragrant mouthfuls.
His hearers laughed, and Captain Valls, proclaiming in a loud voice his Chuetan ancestry, glanced in every direction, as if defying the houses, the people, and the soul of the island, hostile to his race through the fanatical hatred of centuries. His physiognomy revealed his origin.
Valls, in his youth, when he was in command of his father's ships, had known women of every class and color, often finding himself involved in sailors' orgies, which ended in floods of whisky and stabbing affrays. "Pablo, tell us of your love affairs in Jaffa, when the Moors came near killing you."
They both had led a turbulent, cosmopolitan existence, different from the monotonous life of the islanders; they both had squandered money prodigally, but Valls, with the active genius of his race, had known how to earn as much as he had spent, and now, ten years older than Jaime, he had enough to amply supply his modest bachelor needs.
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