Complete Works of Emile Zola (928 page)

“It’s tiresome he doesn’t come back.”

The girl shrugged her shoulders, as though to say that she was in no hurry. Then, after a fresh silence:

“So, Corporal, they call you Jean, and nothing else?”

“Why, no; Jean Macquart.’’

“And you don’t belong to our part of the country?”

“No, I’m a Provençal, from Plassans, a town over yon­der.”

She had raised her eyes to examine him, surprised that any one could come from so far off.

“After Solferino,” continued he, “eighteen months since, I came back from Italy with my discharge, and a fellow-soldier brought me here. Then, d’ye see, my old trade of carpen­ter no longer suited me, and, what with one thing and another, I stopped at the farm.”

“Ah!” said she, simply, without taking her big, black eyes off him, “it’s curious, all the same.”

At that moment, as La Coliche gave a prolonged, despairing low of desire, a hoarse murmur came from the cow-house, the door of which was shut.

“Hullo!” cried Jean, “that brute of a Cæsar has heard her. Hark! he’s talking inside there. Oh, he knows his busi­ness. You can’t bring one of ‘em into the yard but he smells her out, and knows what he’s wanted for.”

Then, breaking off:

“I say, the neatherd must have stopped with Monsieur Hourdequin, If thee liked, I would bring thee the bull, and thee needn’t come back again. We could manage it all right by ourselves.”

“Not half a bad idea,” said Françoise, getting up.

As he opened the door of the cow-house, he paused to ask:

“Must thy animal be tied up?”

“Tied up? No, no! not worth while. She is quite ready; she won’t so much as stir.”

When the door was opened you saw, in two rows on either side of the central path, the thirty farm cows, some lying in the litter, others crunching the beets in their manger; and, from the corner where he stood, one of the bulls, a black Dutch, spotted with white, stretched out his head in anticipation of his task.

As soon as he was untied, he slowly emerged. Then stopping short, as though surprised by the fresh air and sunlight, he remained motionless for a minute, bracing himself up, his sinewy tail swinging, his neck inflated, his muzzle outstretched to sniff. La Coliche, without stirring, turned towards him her large, fixed eyes, and lowed more softly. Then he advanced, pressed against her, and laid his head on her hind-quarters, abruptly and roughly; with his tongue, which was hanging out, he put her tail aside, and licked her as far as the thighs; she letting him do as he pleased, and keeping quite still, save for a slight quivering of her skin. Jean and Françoise waited gravely, their arms hanging beside them.

When Cæsar was ready, he got upon La Coliche with a jerk, and with such weighty force as to shake the ground. She had not given way, and he compressed her flanks with his two feet. But she, a strapping animal from the Cotentin, was so tall, so broad for him, who was of a smaller breed, that he could not reach. He was conscious of it, and made a vain effort to raise himself and to bring her nearer.

“He is too small,” said Françoise.

“Yes, a little,” said Jean. “But that don’t matter; he’ll do it all the same.

She shook her head in doubt; and, as Cæsar still fumbled about, and seemed to be getting exhausted, she came to a resolution.

“No, he must be helped,” she said. “If he goes wrong, it’ll be waste of time.”

Calmly and carefully, as if bent on a serious piece of work, she had drawn near. Her intentness made the pupils of her eyes retreat, left her red lips half open, and kept her features motionless. Raising her arm with a sweep she aided the animal in his efforts, and he, gathering up his strength, speedily accomplished his purpose. It was done. Firmly, with the im­passive fertility of land which is sown with seed the cow had unflinchingly received the fruitful stream of the male. Indeed, she had not even trembled at the shock; and he had already dropped again to the ground, shaking the earth once more.

Françoise having withdrawn her hand, remained with her arm in the air. Finally she lowered it, saying:

“That’s all right.”

“Yes, and neatly done,” replied Jean, with an air of con­viction, mingled with a good workman’s satisfaction at seeing work well and expeditiously performed.

It did not occur to him to indulge in any of the spicy remarks with which the farm-servants used to chaff the girls who brought their cows for this purpose. The child seemed to con­sider it all so simple and necessary that there was, indeed, nothing to laugh at fairly. It was Nature.

However, Jacqueline had been standing at the door again for an instant or so, and with a chuckle which was habitual to her, she cried jestingly:

“Eh! poke your nose everywhere! So you hold the candle now!”

Jean having burst into a horse-laugh, Françoise suddenly flushed all over, quite confused; and to hide her embarrassment — while Cæsar returned of his own accord into the cow-house, and La Coliche munched a stalk of oats which had grown in the manure-pit — she dived into her pockets, fumbled about, eventually produced her handkerchief, untied the corner of it, in which she had wrapped up the two-franc fee, and said:

“Here! There’s the money! And good day to you!”

She set out with her cow, and Jean took his bag again and followed her, telling Jacqueline that he was going to the Poteau field, according to the instructions issued by Monsieur Hourdequin, for the day.

“Good!” she replied. “The harrow ought to be there.”

Then as the young man came up with the girl, and they went off in single file down the narrow path, she called out to them again, in her coarse, bantering voice:

“No danger, eh? If you lose yourselves together the chit knows her way about.”

Behind them the farmyard was again deserted. Neither had laughed this time. They walked on slowly, and the only sound was that of their shoes striking against the stones. All that Jean noticed of Françoise was the nape of her childlike neck, over which curled some short black hair under her round cap. At last, after going some fifty paces:

“She does wrong to chaff others about the men,” said Françoise, sedately. “I might have answered her—”

And turning towards the young fellow with a mischievous upward glance:

“It’s true, isn’t it, that she is false to Monsieur Hourdequin, just as if she were already his wife? You know as much about that, maybe, as most people.”

His eyes fell, and he looked sheepish. “Lord! she does as she likes; it’s her affair,” he answered.

Françoise had turned her back and was pursuing her road.

“That’s true enough. I was only in fun, because you’re old enough to be my father, and because it’s of no consequence one way or the other. But there’s one thing, since Buteau played that dirty trick on my sister, I’ve taken an oath that I’d rather be cut in two than have a lover.”

Jean bent his head, and they spoke no more. The little Poteau field lay at the bottom of the path, half way to Rognes. When the young fellow got there he stopped. The harrow was waiting for him, and a sack of seed had been emptied out into a furrow. He filled his bag, saying:

“Good-bye, then!”

“Good-bye,” replied Françoise. “Thanks again!”

But, in sudden apprehension, he drew himself up and called out:

“I say! suppose La Coliche began again; shall I go with you all the way?”

She was already some distance off, but she turned round, and through the deep stillness of the country air came the sound of her calm, steady voice:

“No, no! There’s no need, it’s all right! She’s got quite as much as she can carry!”

Jean, with his seed-bag at his waist, had started down the piece of plough land, with his ceaseless gesture of throwing the grain; he raised his eyes and looked at Françoise diminishing in height among the fields, looking quite small behind her lazy cow, which was swinging heavily from side to side. When he turned up again, he ceased to see her; but, as he came back, there she was again, but smaller still, so slim as to seem like some new kind of dandelion, with her slight figure and her white cap. Thrice she dwindled thus; then, when he once more looked for her, she had apparently turned down by the church.

Two o’clock struck. The sky remained grey, dull, and cold, as if the sun were buried under spadefuls of ashes for weary months, till the spring-time returned. The dreariness of the clouds was relieved by one lighter patch towards Orléans, as if the sun were shining somewhere in that direction, leagues away; and against that glimmering patch the steeple of Rognes stood out, the village itself sloping down from view into the fold made by the valley of the Aigre. But on the north, towards Chartres, the level line of the horizon clearly separated the leaden uniformity of the waste sky from the endless vista of La Beauce, like an ink-stroke across a monochrome sketch. Since the mid-day meal, the number of sowers seemed to have increased. Now each patch of the little farm-lands had one to itself; they multiplied and teemed like black laborious ants roused to activity by some heavy piece of work, and straining every nerve over a mighty task, giant-like in size as compared with their littleness. And still you might descry, even in the most remote, the one persistent never-varying gesture; still did the pertinacious insect-like sowers wrestle with the vast earth, and become eventually the victors over space and life.

Till nightfall Jean sowed. After the Poteau field there were the Rigoles and the Quatre-Chemins. To and fro, to and fro, he paced the fields, with long, rhythmical steps, till the corn in his bag came to an end; while, in his wake, the seed strewed all the soil.

CHAPTER II

The house of Maître Baillehache, notary at Cloyes, was situated in the Rue Grouaise, on the left hand going to Châteaudun. A little white, one-storey house it was, at the corner of which a bracket was riveted for the rope of the single lantern which lighted this broad, paved street, deserted during the week, but on Saturday nights crowded with a living tide of peasants coining to market. From afar might be seen the gleam of the two professional escutcheons against the chalk-like wall of the low buildings; and, behind, a narrow garden stretched down to the Loir.

On that Saturday, in the room which served as an office, and which looked out upon the street to the right of the entrance hall, the youngest clerk, a pale, wizened boy of fifteen, had drawn up one of the muslin curtains to see the people pass. The other two clerks — one old, corpulent, and very dirty; one younger, scraggy, and a hopeless victim to liver complaint — were writing at a double desk of ebonised deal, there being no other furniture except seven or eight chairs and a cast-iron stove, which was never lit till December, even if it snowed a month before. Rows of pigeon-holes decorated the walls, with greenish pasteboard boxes, broken at the corners and full to repletion with bundles of yellow papers, and the room was pervaded with an unwholesome smell of ink gone bad and dust-eaten documents.

However, seated side by side, two peasants, man and wife, were waiting in deep respect, like statues of Patience. So many papers, and, more than all, the gentlemen who wrote so fast, with their pens all scratching away at once, sobered them by evoking vague visions of law-suits and money. The woman, aged thirty-four, very dark, with a countenance which would have been pleasant but for a large nose, had her horny, toil-worn hands crossed over her black cloth, velvet-edged body, and was scanning every corner with her keen eyes, evidently musing on the many title-deeds which reposed here. In the meanwhile the man, five years older, red-haired and stolid, in black trousers and a long, brand-new blue linen blouse, held his round felt hat on his knees, with not a spark of intelligence illuminating his broad, clean-shaven, terra-cotta-like face, which was perforated with two large eyes of porcelain blue, having a fixed stare that reminded one of a somnolent ox.

A door opened, and Maître Baillehache, who had just breakfasted with his brother-in-law, farmer Hourdequin, made his appearance; ruddy and fresh-complexioned despite his fifty-five years, with thick lips and crow’s feet, which gave him a perpetually amused expression. He carried a double eye­glass, and had a lunatic habit of always pulling at his long, grizzled whiskers.

“Ah! it’s you, Delhomme,” said he. “So, old Fouan has consented to divide the property?”

The reply came from the woman.

“Yes, sure, Monsieur Baillehache. We have all made an appointment, so that we may come to an agreement, and that you may tell us how we are to proceed.”

“Good, good, Fanny; we’ll see about it. It’s hardly more than one o’clock, we must wait for the others.”

The notary stopped an instant to chat, asking about the price of corn, which had fallen during the last two months, and showing Delhomme the friendly consideration due to a farmer who owned fifty acres of land, and kept a servant and three cows. Then he returned to his inner room.

The clerks had not raised their heads, but were scratching away with their pens more vigorously than ever; and, once more, the Delhommes waited motionless. Fanny had been a lucky girl to marry a respectable, rich lover without even getting into the family-way beforehand, she whose only expectations had been some seven or eight acres of land from old Fouan. Her husband, however, had not repented of his bargain, for he could not anywhere have found a more active or intelligent housekeeper. Hence he followed her lead in everything, being of a narrow mind, but so steady and straightforward as to be frequently selected as an umpire by the Rognes people.

At that moment the little clerk, who was looking out into the street, stifled a laugh behind his hand, and murmured to his old, corpulent, and very dirty neighbour: “Here’s Hyacinthe the saint coming!”

Fanny bent down quickly to whisper to her husband: “Now, leave everything to me. I am fond enough of papa and mamma, but I won’t have them rob us; and keep a sharp eye on Buteau and that rascal Hyacinthe.”

She referred to her two brothers, having seen one of them approach as she looked out of the window: Hyacinthe, the elder, whom the whole neighbourhood knew as an idler and a drunkard, and who, at the close of his military service, after going through the Algerian campaigns, had taken to a vagabond life, refusing all regular work, and subsisting by poaching and pillage, as if he were still extortioner-in-ordinary among a terrified people of Bedouins.