Complete Works of Emile Zola (944 page)

“Good morning to you, aunt. Everything going on satisfactorily?”

“Why, yes!” answered the old woman, brightening up at the visit. “Now we are gentlefolks, we have only to take a holiday all day long.”

Lise tried to make herself agreeable to her uncle too. “And the appetite’s all right, it seems?” said she.

“Oh!” he answered, “it isn’t that I’m hungry. Only it’s something to do if one eats a bit now and then, it helps to pass the day.”

He seemed so dull that Rose started off into an enthusiastic account of their happiness in not having to do any work. True enough, they had earned it well: it was not a bit too soon to see others running about while they lived on their income. Getting up late, twiddling their thumbs, not caring a pin for wind and weather, not having a single care — ah! it was a thorough change for them; it was perfectly heavenly. He, roused and exhilarated, joined in and improved upon her ac­count. And yet, under all the forced joy, under the feverish exaggeration of their talk, there was plainly perceptible the profound tedium, the torture of idleness, that had racked these two old folks ever since their arms, suddenly becoming inert, had begun to get out of order by disuse, like old machinery thrown aside as waste iron.

At length Lise ventured on the subject of her visit.

“Uncle, they tell me that the other day you had a talk with Buteau.”

“Buteau is a thorough beast!” cried Fouan, suddenly infuriated, and not giving her time to finish. “If he wasn’t as pig-headed as a carroty-haired donkey, should I ever have had that bother with Fanny?”

This first disagreement with his children he had so far kept to himself, but, in his bitterness of heart, the allusion had now escaped him.

On entrusting Delhomme with Buteau’s share, he had in­tended to rent it out at eighty francs a hectare, while Del­homme purposed simply paying a double allowance: two hundred francs for his own share, and two hundred for the other. That was fair, and the old man was the more angry because he had been in the wrong.

“What bother?” asked Lise. “Don’t the Delhommes pay you?”

“Oh, yes!” replied Rose. “Every three months, at the stroke of twelve, the money is there on the table. Only there are ways and ways of paying, aren’t there? And my old man, being sensitive, would like people to behave at least decently. Whereas, since this worry about Buteau’s share, Fanny comes to us with the same air as she would go to the process-server, as if she were being cheated.”

“Yes,” added the old man, “they do pay, and that’s about all. I don’t think that enough. There’s a certain con­sideration due. Their money don’t pay off everything, does it? We’re mere creditors now, nothing more. And yet we’re wrong to grumble. If they’d all of them pay.”

He broke off, and an awkward silence fell. This allusion to Hyacinthe, who hadn’t handed in a copper, but was mortgag­ing his share bit by bit, and getting drunk on the proceeds, wrung the heart of his mother, who was always impelled to defend that darling scamp of hers. She dreaded lest this other sore point should be laid bare, and so she hastily resumed:

“Don’t go fretting yourself about trifles! What’s the odds so long as we’re happy? Enough’s as good as a feast.”

She had never opposed her husband like this before, and he looked at her fixedly.

“Your tongue runs too fast, old woman. I don’t mind being happy, but I won’t be worried.”

She shrank into herself again, huddling lazily together on her chair while he finished his bread, rolling the last mouthful over and over to prolong the recreation. The dull room sank to sleep.

“I wanted to know,” went on Lise, “what Buteau means to do with regard to me and his child? I haven’t worried him much hitherto, but it’s time to settle one way or the other.”

The two old people uttered not a word. She then questioned the father pointedly.

“As you saw him, he must have mentioned me. What did he say?”

“Nothing. He never opened his lips on the subject. And, in fact, there’s nothing to be said. The priest’s pestering me to arrange things, as if anything could be arranged so long as the fellow refuses to accept his share.”

Lise pondered in great perplexity.

“You think he’ll accept some day?”

“It’s still possible.”

“And you think he’d marry me?”

“There’s a chance of it.”

“Then you’d recommend me to wait?”

“Why, that depends on yourself. Everybody acts as they feel.”

She was silent, unwilling to speak of Jean’s proposal, and not knowing how to get a definite answer. Finally she made a last effort.

“You can well understand that I’m sick of not knowing what to expect after all this time. I want a yes or a no. Suppose, uncle you went and asked Buteau? Do!”

Fouan shrugged his shoulders.

“To begin with, I’ll never speak to the skunk again. And then, my girl, how simple you are! Why make a stubborn fool like that say no, who’d always say no afterwards. Leave him free to say yes some day, if it’s to his interest.”

“To be sure!” concluded Rose, simply, once more the echo of her husband.

Lise could get nothing more definite out of them. She left them, shutting the door upon the room, which relapsed into its benumbed condition; and the house seemed empty once more.

In the meadows on the banks of the Aigre, Jean and his two haymakers had begun the first stack. It was Françoise who built it up. Placed on a heap in the centre, she dis­posed circularly around her the forkfuls of hay which the young man and Palmyre brought her. Little by little the stack grew bigger and higher, she being always in the midst, and filling up the hollow in which she stood with bundles of hay as soon as the wall around her rose up to her knees. The rick was now beginning to take shape. It was already more than two yards high, and Palmyre and Jean had to raise their forks on high. The work did not proceed without the accompaniment of loud laughter, inspired by the exhilaration of the open air, and by the jests bandied to and fro amid the sweet-scented hay. Françoise, whose handkerchief had slipped down off the back of her head, which was bare to the sun, and whose hair was in disarray and entangled with grass and withered flowers — was in the happiest of moods amid that growing pile in which she was plunged up to her thighs. She buried her bare arms in the mass; every bundle tossed up from below covered her with a shower of stalks; and at times she vanished from sight and pretended to come to grief among the eddies.

“Oh, good gracious! There’s something pricking me!”

“Whereabouts?”

“Under my petticoats; up here.”

“It’s a spider. Hold hard! keep your legs together.”

And the laughter grew louder, at improper jests that made them split their sides.

Delhomme, in the distance, was disturbed, and turned his head for an instant but without ceasing to ply his scythe. Oh, yes! a lot of work that little chit must be doing, playing like that! Now-a-days girls were spoiled, and only worked to amuse themselves. He went on, laying the swath low with hurried strokes, and leaving a clear wake behind him. The sun sank in the heavens, the mowers broadened the gaps they had made. Victor, although he had left off hammering his blade, evinced no particular haste; and as La Trouille went by with her geese, he slily slipped off, and ran to meet her under shelter of a thick line of willows that edged the stream.

“Aha!” cried Jean; “he prefers something else to mowing.”

Françoise burst into a fresh guffaw.

“He’s too old for her,” said she.

“Too old! Listen, and you’ll hear them.”

Then he began to coo so funnily and successfully that Palmyre, holding her stomach as if she were griped by colic, said:

“What’s come to that fellow Jean to-day? Isn’t he funny?”

The forkfuls of grass were being flung up higher and higher, and the stack was steadily growing.

They joked about Lequeu and Berthe, who had eventually sat down. Most likely she was having herself tickled at a respectful distance with a straw. But let the school-master set the pastry to bake as much as he liked, he wouldn’t have the eating of it.

“Isn’t he dirty!” repeated Palmyre, who couldn’t laugh, and was consequently suffocating.

Then Jean chaffed her.

“Don’t tell me that you’ve got to the age of thirty-two and never yet had to do with a young man!”

“Me! Never!”

“What! No young man ever caught hold of you? You’ve no lovers?”

“No, no.”

She had grown quite pale and serious, with her long grief-stained face, already worn and stupefied by labour, and retain­ing only the clear, shallow, faithful eyes of a hound. Perchance she was recalling her miserable, friendless, loveless life, the existence of a beast of burden whipped back at night, heavy-eyed, to its stable. She had stopped short, and stood grasping her fork, with a far-away look towards the distant country-side, that she had never even seen.

There was a silence. Françoise was listening, motionless, at the top of the stack; while Jean, who had also stopped to take breath, went on with his banter, hesitating to say what was on the tip of his tongue. At length he resolved to speak out.

“Then it’s all lies what they say about you and Hilarion?” he asked.

Palmyre’s face suddenly turned from white to crimson, the rush of blood momentarily restoring her the aspect of her lost youth. She stammered with surprise and vexation, at a loss for the disclaimer she desired.

“Oh, the backbiters! Only to think of it!”

Françoise and Jean, with a resumption of noisy mirth, spoke both at once, pressed her hard, and flurried her. Why, in the ruined cow-shed, where Palmyre and Hilarion lodged, there was hardly any room to move about. Their mattresses lay touching on the floor; how easy it was to make a mistake in the dark!

“Come, it’s true; confess it’s true! Besides, it’s well known.”

Drawing herself up, Palmyre, quite bewildered, gave vent to her passion and pain:

“Well, and supposing that it were true,” she exclaimed, “what the devil is it to you? The poor boy hasn’t so happy a life as it is.”

A couple of tears rolled down her cheeks, so wrung was she by her feeling of motherhood for the cripple. After earn­ing him his bread, supposing she did accord him what others refused him, why it cost them nothing! With the darkened intellect of clod-like beings, these pariahs and outcasts of love would have been at a loss to relate how the thing had been brought about. An instinctive approach without deliberate consent, he stung by desire, she passively yielding to his purpose; thus it had begun. Then, too, there was the happi­ness of their feeling warmer, in that miserable hovel where they both shivered with the cold.

“She is right, what is it to us?” resumed Jean, in his grave, kindly way, touched to see her in such agitation. “It’s their own concern and nobody else’s.”

Besides, another circumstance took up their attention. Hyacinthe had just come down from the Château, the old cellar in which he dwelt amid the brushwood, half-way up the hill; and from the top of the road he was calling for La Trouille with all his might, cursing and bawling out that his drab of a daughter had disappeared two hours ago, without troubling her head about their evening meal.

“Your daughter,” cried Jean to him, “is under the willows with Victor.”

Hyacinthe raised both his hands to heaven. “Oh, the cursed troll! Bringing dishonour upon me! I’ll go and fetch my whip.”

He then ran back again to fetch the large horse-whip he kept hung up behind his door for use on these occasions.

La Trouille must have heard him, for there was a prolonged rustling under the leaves, as of some one escaping; and, two minutes later, Victor carelessly strolled back. He examined his scythe, and finally returned to his work. When Jean called over to him to ask if he had got the stomach-ache, he replied:

“Rather!”

The rick was now nearly completed, more than four yards high, solid, and rounded into bee-hive shape. Palmyre flung up the last trusses with her long thin arms; and Françoise, standing on the apex, seemed to grow taller against the pale sky, lit up by the pink glow of the setting sun. She was now quite out of breath, quite tremulous after her exertion, bathed in perspiration, with her hair clinging to her skin. Her bodice was open, showing her firm little bosom, while her skirt had burst its fastenings and was slipping down from her haunches.

“Oh, dear! How high it is! I’m getting giddy,” she said; and then she laughed shiveringly, and hesitated; not venturing to descend, but merely stretching out her foot and instantly drawing it back again.

“No, it’s too high. Go and get a ladder,” she added.

“Sit down, stupid, why don’t you!” said Jean. “Slide down.”

“No, no! I’m afraid; I can’t!”

There were shouts of encouragement, and some free jesting.

Not on her stomach; that would make it swell! On her croup, provided she had no chilblains there! He, standing below, was getting excited as he looked up at the legs of the girl, gradually feeling exasperated to see her so high out of reach, and unconsciously seized with a virile desire to get close to her and embrace her.

“Don’t I tell you you won’t do yourself any damage,” he called. “Roll down; you’ll fall into my arms.”

“No, no!”

He had stationed himself in front of the rick, and spread out his arms, displaying his chest that she might throw herself upon it. When she suddenly came to a decision, and, shutting her eyes, let herself go, her fall down the slippery side of the stack was so smart that she knocked him over and got somehow a-straddle round his ribs. She lay on the ground, with her petti­coats up, choking with laughter and spluttering out that she wasn’t hurt. On feeling her burning and perspiring form against his face, he had seized her in his arms. Her powerful feminine odour, the strong smell of the hay and the fresh air, intoxicated him, stiffening all his sinews with a sudden mad desire. Then, too, there was something else; a hitherto unknown passion for this child, now bursting into strength; a sentimental and sensual fondness which had originated long back, increasing with their frolicsome, hearty laughter, and ending in this long­ing to clasp her there upon the grass.