Complete Works of Emile Zola (960 page)

Françoise burst into sobs.

“Monsieur Patoir,” said she, “I implore you, save our cow. Poor Coliche! she’s so fond of me!”

Both Lise, sallow with a fit of griping, and Buteau, in rude health, so unfeeling as they were regarding the woes of others, now lamented and softened, making the same supplication.

“Save our cow, our old cow that has given us such good milk for years and years,” they begged in chorus. “Pray save her, Monsieur Patoir.”

“Well, one thing must be clearly understood: I shall be forced to cut up the calf.”

“Who cares a curse for the calf? Save our cow, Monsieur Patoir, save her!”

Then the veterinary, who had brought a large blue apron with him, borrowed a pair of canvas trousers. Stripping him­self quite naked in a corner, behind Rougette, he slipped on the trousers, and then tied the apron round his loins. When he reappeared in this scanty costume, with his genial bull-dog face and his fat and dumpy figure, La Coliche lifted her head and, no doubt from astonishment, ceased to complain. How­ever, no one even smiled, so wrung with anxiety was every heart.

“Light some candles!” said Patoir.

He set four on the ground, and then lay down flat on his stomach in the straw, behind the cow, who was now unable to get up. For a moment he remained flat, examining her. Near by he had placed a little box, and, having raised himself on his elbow, he was taking a bistoury out of it, when a husky groan startled him, and he at once assumed a sitting posture.

“What, still there, my stout matron? Well, I thought that couldn’t be the cow!”

It was Lise, seized with the final pangs.

“For goodness sake go and get your business over in your own room, and leave me to do mine here! It disturbs me; it acts on my nerves, ‘pon my honour it does, to hear you strain­ing behind me. Come, come! It’s not common sense! Take her away, the rest of you!”

La Frimat and La Bécu decided to take her each by an arm and lead her to her room. She surrendered herself, no longer having the strength to resist. But on crossing the kitchen, where a solitary candle was burning, she asked to have all the doors left open, with the idea that she would thus not be so far off. La Frimat had already prepared the bed of anguish according to rural custom — a simple sheet spread out in the middle of the room over a truss of straw, and three chairs turned down. Lise squatted down and stretched herself, with her back against one chair and one leg against each of the others. She was not even undressed.

Buteau and Françoise had remained in the cow-house to light Patoir; they squatted on their heels, each holding a candle, while the veterinary, again stretched out on his stomach, cut a section round the left ham with his bistoury. He loosened the skin, and then pulled at the calf’s shoulder, which came away. Françoise, pale and faint, dropped her candle and fled with a shriek.

“My poor old Coliche,” she exclaimed; “I won’t see it! I won’t see it!”

Thereupon Patoir lost his temper, the more so as he had to rise up and extinguish an incipient conflagration, caused by the fall of Françoise’s candle among the straw.

“Drat the wench! She might be a princess, with her nerves. She’d smoke us like so many hams,” he remarked in a peevish tone.

Françoise had run and flung herself on a chair in the room where her sister was being confined. The latter’s exposure did not disturb her. It seemed a mere matter of course, after what she had just seen. She waved from her memory that vision of living severed flesh, and gave a stammering account of what was being done to the cow.

“It’s sure to go wrong; I must go back,” said Lise sud­denly; and despite her sufferings, she made an effort to get up from among the three chairs. But La Frimat and La Bécu grew angry, and held her down.

“Good heavens! will you keep still! What on earth pos­sesses you?” exclaimed La Frimat.

“So as to keep you quiet,” said La Bécu, “I’ll go myself and bring you the news.”

From that moment La Bécu did nothing but run to and fro between the room and the cow-house. To save continually making the journey, she at last shouted out her report from the kitchen. The veterinary was still busily occupied with his nasty, troublesome job, and he emerged from it disgustingly filthy from head to foot.

“It’s all right, Lise,” exclaimed La Bécu; “don’t be uneasy. We’ve got the other shoulder, and it will soon be all over now.”

Lise saluted each phase of the operation with a heartrending sigh; and no one knew whether the lament was for herself or for the calf. There was not the slightest cessation of her travail, and she seemed to be seized with inconsolable despair.

“Oh, dear, how unlucky! Oh, dear, how unlucky to lose such a fine calf!”

Françoise likewise lamented, and the regrets they all ex­pressed grew so aggressive, so full of implied hostility, that Patoir felt hurt. He hurried to them, stopping, however, outside the door, for decency’s sake.

“I say! I give you warning. Just remember that you implored me to save your cow. I know you so well, you beggars. Now, don’t you go about telling everybody that I killed your calf.”

“That’s right enough, right enough,” muttered Buteau, going back with him into the cow-house. “All the same, it was you that cut it up.”

As Lise lay prostrate among the three chairs, a kind of billow passed over her. Françoise, who in her desolation had so far seen nothing, became quite thunderstruck.

“A little more patience,” said La Frimat. “It’ll soon be all right.”

Françoise, on her part, shook herself free from the fascina­tion of the sight, and feeling embarrassed, went and took her sister’s hand.

“My poor Lise,” she said affectionately, “what great trouble you’re in!”

“Oh, yes, yes! And no one pities me. If I only had some pity! Oh, dear! It’s beginning again. Won’t it ever be born?”

This kind of talk might have gone on for a considerable time, but some exclamations were heard in the cow-house. They came from Patoir, who, astonished to find La Coliche still quivering and moaning, had suspected the presence of a second calf. And, indeed, there was one. Buteau ran into his wife’s room carrying the little animal, which hung its astonished head in a tipsy-like way.

Amid the general acclamations at the sight, Lise broke into an endless, irresistible peal of mad laughter, stuttering:

“Oh, how funny it looks! Oh! it’s too bad to make me laugh like this! Oh, dear! Oh! oh! how I am suffering! No, no! don’t make me laugh any more: I’ve had enough!”

The climax was at length reached.

“It’s a girl,” declared La Frimat.

“No, no!” said Lise, who felt disappointed, “I don’t want one: I want a boy.”

Patoir went away, after two quarts of sweetened wine had been given to La Coliche. La Frimat undressed Lise and put her to bed, while La Bécu, assisted by Françoise, cleared away the straw and swept up the room. In ten minutes’ time all was in order. No one would have had any idea that a con­finement had just taken place, except for the constant mewling of the baby, who was being washed in warm water. How­ever, after being swathed, the infant gradually became quiet; while the mother, now utterly prostrate, fell into a leaden sleep, and lay with her face congested, almost black, between the thick brownish sheets.

Towards midnight, when the two neighbours had left, Françoise told Buteau that he had better go up into the hay-loft to sleep. She had laid a mattress on the floor, and meant to stay there for the night, so as not to leave her sister alone. He made no answer, but finished his pipe in silence. All was quiet, save for the heavy breathing of the sleeping Lise.

As Françoise was kneeling on her mattress, at the very foot of the bed, in a darkened corner, Buteau, still silent, suddenly came up behind her and laid her flat. She turned her head, and instantly grasped the situation, from the look of his drawn, flushed face. He was at it again; he had not relinquished his purpose, and, presumably, the longing was a violent one, since he attacked her thus beside his wife, and just after occurrences which were scarcely of an engaging kind. Françoise repulsed and overturned him, however, and then there was a suppressed, panting struggle.

With a snigger, and in a choking voice, he said:

“Come, come! Why should you mind? I’m equal to taking on the two of you.”

He knew her well, and felt sure she would not scream. Nor did she. She resisted without a word, too proud to call to her sister, unwilling to acquaint any one, even Lise, with her busi­ness. He was stifling her, however, and seemed on the point of succeeding.

“It’ll be so convenient, as we’re living together, and shall be always with each other,” he said.

But suddenly he gave a cry of pain. She had silently dug her nails into his neck. Then he grew mad, and spoke of Jean, saying:

“Don’t think you’ll marry him, that blackguard fellow of yours. Never, so long as you’re under age.”

As he was now doing her brutal violence, she kicked him so rigorously that he howled aloud. Then he bounded up in alarm, looking anxiously towards the bed. His wife was sleeping so soundly, however, that she had not stirred. Nevertheless, he went off, with a terrible threatening gesture.

When Françoise had stretched herself on the mattress, amid the deep stillness of the room, she lay there with her eyes open. She would never let him have his way, that she wouldn’t, even although she herself were perchance desirous. And she felt astonished at it all; for the idea that she might marry Jean had never yet occurred to her.

CHAPTER VI

Jean had been engaged for a couple of days in some fields which Hourdequin owned near Rognes, and where he had set up a steam threshing-machine, hired from a Châteaudun engine-builder, who sent it about from Bonneval to Cloyes. With his cart and his two horses, the young man brought the sheaves from the surrounding ricks, and then took the grain to the farm; while the machine, puffing away from morning till night, scattered golden dust in the sunlight, and filled the country­side with a terrific, incessant snorting.

Jean was not well, and was ransacking his brains as to how he might best recover possession of Françoise. A month had already gone by since he had clasped her, on that very spot, among the wheat which they were now threshing; and since then she had always escaped from him, apprehensively. He began to despair of renewing the intercourse; and yet his desire was increasing, becoming an all-absorbing, maddening passion. As he drove his horses, he wondered why he should not go to the Buteaus and roundly ask for Françoise’s hand. There had been no open definitive rupture between them. He still bade them good-day as he passed, and, if he did not call on them, it was solely because he was influenced by the dis­quietude of guilt. As soon as this idea of marriage occurred to him, as the only means of getting the girl back, he persuaded himself that it was the path of duty, and that he should be acting dishonourably if he did not marry her. The next morn­ing, however, when he returned to the machine, he was seized with fear; and he would never have dared to risk the step had he not seen Buteau and Françoise set off together for the fields. He then bethought himself that Lise had always been favourable to him, and that, with her, he would possess more confidence. So he slipped away for a few moments, leaving his horses in charge of a fellow-servant.

“Why, Jean!” cried Lise, sturdily up and about again after her confinement; “no one ever sees you now. What’s up?”

He made some excuses, and then, with the brusqueness of shy people, he hurriedly broached the subject, in such an awkward way, however, that at first it was open for her to think that he was making her a declaration. For he reminded her that he had loved her, and that he would willingly have taken her to wife, However, he at once added:

“And that’s why I’d all the same marry Françoise if she were given me.”

Lise stared at him in such astonishment that he began to stammer:

“Oh, I’m well aware that it can’t be settled straight off. I only wanted to talk to you about it!”

“Well, it takes me by surprise,” she replied at length, “because I hardly expected such a thing, on account of your ages. First of all, we must know what Françoise thinks.”

He had come formally resolved to tell the whole tale, thus hoping to make the marriage inevitable. But at the last moment a scruple restrained him. If Françoise had not con­fessed to her sister, if no one knew anything about it, had he the right to speak? He was discouraged, and felt ridiculous, on account of his thirty-three years of age.

“Most certainly,” he muttered, “she should be consulted. Nobody would force her.”

Lise, however, having once got over her astonishment, looked at him as genially as ever. Evidently the idea did not displease her. She was even quite gracious.

“It shall be as she chooses, Jean. I’m not like Buteau, who thinks her too young. She’s getting on for eighteen, and she has the build for two men, let alone one. And, besides, love is all very well between sister and sister, of course; but now that she’s a woman, I’d rather have a servant under orders in her place. If she says yes, take her! You’re a good sort, and the old cocks are often the best.”

She had been unable to restrain these words of complaint anent the gradual estrangement which was irresistibly increas­ing between herself and her younger sister: that hostility, aggravated by little daily jars, a secret leaven of jealousy and hatred which had been doing its stealthy work ever since a man had come into the house with his will and his lust.

Jean, in his delight, kissed Lise warmly on both cheeks.

“It happens that we’re just christening the baby,” she added, “and we shall have the family to dinner this evening. I invite you, and you shall make your proposal to old Fouan, who’s the guardian, that is if Françoise will have you.”

“Agreed!” cried he. “I’ll see you to-night!”

He rapidly strode back to his horses, and drove them all day long, making his whip resound with clacks which rang out like gun-shots on the morning of a fête.

The Buteaus were, indeed, having their child baptised after a deal of delay. First of all, Lise had insisted on waiting till she was quite strong and well again, wishing to join in the feast. Next — on ambitious thoughts intent — she had obstinately resolved to have Monsieur and Madame Charles for godfather and godmother, and they having condescendingly consented, it had been necessary to wait for Madame Charles, who had just started for Chartres to lend a helping hand in her daughter’s establishment, for as it was now the time of the September fair, the house in the Rue aux Juifs was always full. However, as Lise had told Jean, the christening was to be simply a family gathering, with Fouan, La Grande, the Delhommes, and the godparents.