Complete Works of Emile Zola (985 page)

At last, Lise, affected by the sight of such keen hunger, interposed.

“Let him alone,” she said, “since it pleases him to play the dummy.”

“I’m not going to have him playing the fool with me again!” retorted Buteau angrily. “I’ve had quite sufficient of that already. Let to-day be a lesson to you, you pig-headed old fool! If you give me any more of your nonsense, I shall leave you to starve out on the road!”

Fouan, having now quite finished his soup, rose painfully from his seat, and, still maintaining his unbroken silence — a sepulchral silence that seemed to grow ever more oppressive — turned his back and dragged himself under the staircase to his bed, on which he threw himself without undressing. Somnolence seemed to descend on him like a thunderbolt. He was sound asleep in a moment, wrapped in a leaden slumber.

Lise, who stepped up to look at him, came back and told her husband that he looked as though he were dead. Buteau, how­ever, after going to see him, shrugged his shoulders. Dead, indeed! did fellows like him die like that? Only he must have knocked about to be in such a state. When they came to look at him the next morning, he did not appear to have moved, and he slept on throughout the day and the following night, and only awoke once more the second morning, after remaining annihilated, as it were, for thirty-six hours.

“Ah, there you are again at last!” cried Buteau with a snigger. “I was beginning to think that you meant to go on sleeping for ever, and would never want anything more to eat.”

The old man neither looked at him nor spoke to him, but went out and sat down on the road to breathe the fresh air.

From this time forth Fouan isolated himself in moody silence. He seemed to have forgotten all about the papers which Buteau had refused to restore to him. At any rate, he never spoke about them and never attempted to discover where they were; perhaps feeling indifferent about them, but certainly resigned. His rupture with the Buteaus seemed complete, and he persisted in maintaining his dogged silence, as though he were a creature cut off from all others, and en­tombed. Nowhere, under no circumstances, no matter what might be his need, did he ever speak a word to the Buteaus. He shared in the common existence of the household; he slept there, ate there, saw his son and daughter-in-law, and elbowed them from morning till night, but he never gave them a look or a word; it was as if he had been blind and dumb, as if he were a ghost abiding amongst living beings. Buteau and Lise soon grew tired of worrying him without getting even a sigh in answer, and they left him alone in his obstinate silence. They both ceased to speak to him and to look at him. They began to consider him merely as a piece of peripatetic furniture, and at last they grew perfectly unconscious of his presence. The horse and the two cows were of more account than he was.

In the whole house Fouan had but one friend, little Jules, who was now completing his ninth year. Laure, who was four years old, looked at him with the same harsh gaze as her parents did, and wriggled out of his arms, conducting herself, indeed, as though she were full of bitter indignation against one who ate but did no work. Jules, however, delighted in being with the old man, and got on wonderfully well with him. He was, as it were, the last link uniting Fouan to the others, and he became his messenger and mouthpiece. Whenever a definite yes or no became absolutely necessary Lise sent the lad to the old man, who, for him alone, consented to break his silence. Fouan being neglected, the lad played the part of a little ser­vant-maid, helped him to make his bed of a morning, and carried him his allowance of soup, which the old man ate near the window, resting the plate upon his knees, for he had re­fused to resume his place at the table. Then the two played together, and the old man, delighted when he met the lad out-of-doors, took hold of his hand and went off with him for a long ramble. Upon occasions like these Fouan made up for his long silences, and poured forth so much chatter that he almost dazed his little companion, though he could no longer speak without difficulty. He seemed to be losing the use of his tongue, now that he had ceased to employ it. But the aged grandfather who stammered, and the lad who had no ideas beyond birds’ nests and blackberries, got on remarkably well together. The old man taught his grandson how to lime twigs, and made him a little cage to keep crickets in. The lad’s frail hand was now his only support along the roads of La Beauce, where he no longer had either land or relatives left him; and thanks to Jules he felt some pleasure in living a little longer.

In point of fact, however, it was as if Fouan had been struck out of the list of the living. Buteau took his place and acted in his name, received his money and gave receipts for it, upon the pretext that his father no longer possessed his wits.

The interest on the money derived from the sale of the old man’s house, amounting to a hundred and fifty francs a year, was paid by Monsieur Baillehache direct to Buteau, whose only difficulty had been with Delhomme, the latter refusing to pay the annuity of two hundred francs to any one excepting his father-in-law, and insisting upon the old man’s presence to receive it. As soon, however, as Delhomme’s back was turned, Buteau took possession of the cash. He thus received three hundred and fifty francs a year, but he used to say in a whining voice that he had to add as much more to it, and even more than that, to defray the expense of his father’s keep. He never referred to the scrip he had appropriated. That was quite safe, and they could all settle about it later on. He alleged that the dividends were exhausted in keeping up the payments to old Saucisse, fifteen sous every day, for the pur­chase of the acre and a quarter of land. He protested that it would never do to let this agreement break through, now that so much money had been paid under it. There was a report, however, that old Saucisse, under the pressure of some violent threat, had consented to annul the agreement, and to hand Buteau half the money he had received under it, a thousand francs out of two thousand; and the fact that the old scamp held his tongue was accounted for by his fear of letting his neighbours know too much of his affairs, and by his unwilling­ness to confess that he, also, had been worsted in his turn. Buteau had, indeed, realised that Fouan would die the first, for he was now so infirm that he could scarcely stand upright; had he received a cuffing he would probably have fallen to the ground powerless ever to rise again.

A year passed away, and yet Fouan was still alive, although he was growing weaker every day. He was no longer the neat old peasant of yore, with a clean-shaven face, and dressed in a clean new blouse and black trousers. His big bony nose, which appeared to be stretching forward towards the ground, seemed to be the only feature left in his withered, fleshless face. His stoop had increased slightly every year, and by this time he was almost bent double; he now only had to take the final somersault which would land him in his grave. He dragged himself along by the aid of two thick sticks, his face half covered by a long, dirty white beard, his body clad in the soiled and ragged cast-off clothes of his son; and he was in such an unpleasantly neglected condition that he looked quite repug­nant in the full light of day, resembling one of those tattered old tramps to whom passers-by give a wide berth. In the wreck only the animal part of his nature survived, with the mere instinct of living. A feeling of ravenous hunger always made him fall keenly on his soup, and he was never satisfied; he stuffed himself with bread when he happened to be alone in the house, and he even stole Jules’s bread and butter from him, unless the lad resisted. In consequence of his predatory habits, the Buteaus reduced his quantity of food at meal-times, and they even took advantage of the situation to under-feed him, pretending that he stuffed himself till he nearly burst.

Buteau accused him of having ruined himself during his stay at the Château with Hyacinthe, and this accusation was well founded, for this whilom sober, self-stinting peasant, who had once lived upon bread and water, had there fallen into ways of dissipation, contracting a taste for meat and brandy, so that he now suffered at being deprived of them. Vicious habits quickly take hold of a man, even when it is a son who debauches his father. The wine disappeared so rapidly that Lise was obliged to lock it up; and, on the days when any meat soup was being cooked, little Laure was set to mount guard over it. Since the old man had run into debt with Lengaigne for a cup of coffee, both Lengaigne and the Macquerons had been warned by Buteau that he would not pay them if they supplied his father on credit. The old man still maintained his tragic silence, but sometimes when his plate was not quite full, or when the wine was removed with­out any being given to him, he fixed his bleared eyes upon his son in a prolonged stare, in the impotent rage of his ravenous craving. Did they want him to die of starvation? he seemed to be asking.

“Oh, you may stare at me as hard as you like!” Buteau used to say, “but do you imagine I’m going to pamper brutes that do nothing? Those who like meat ought to earn it, you miserable old greedy-guts! You ought to be ashamed of yourself for going in for dissipation at your time of life!”

Though Fouan’s obstinate pride had prevented him return­ing to the Delhommes’, for he brooded unforgetfully over his daughter’s stinging remark, he tolerated every indignity from the Buteaus, their cutting speeches, and even their blows. He no longer thought about his other children, but surrendered himself in utter weariness, without any idea of making his escape from it all. He would be no better off anywhere else, so what was the good of troubling himself to move? When Fanny met him she passed by stiffly, having sworn that she would not be the first to speak. Hyacinthe, who was more good-natured, though he had borne his father a grudge for some time on account of the shabby fashion in which he had left the Château, amused himself one evening by making the old man abominably drunk at Macqueron’s, and then leaving him in this condition outside Buteau’s door. There was a dreadful scene; the house was upset; Lise was obliged to wash the kitchen out, and Buteau swore that if such a thing occurred again he would make his father sleep on the dung-heap, so that the old man got afraid, and became so suspicious of his elder son that he no longer dared to accept his offers of refreshments. He often saw La Trouille with her geese while he was sitting out of doors at the road side. The girl would stop and examine him with her little eyes, and even talk to him for a moment or two, while her geese waited behind her, standing on one leg and poking out their necks. One morning, however, the old man discovered that she had stolen his handkerchief, and from that time forth whenever he caught sight of her in the distance he shook his sticks at her threateningly, as if to drive her away. She made sport of him and amused herself by setting her geese at him, only going off when some passer-by threatened to cuff her if she did not leave her grandfather in peace.

So far Fouan had been able to walk, and this had been a source of much consolation to him, for he still took an interest in the soil, and constantly re-visited his old property, just as some worn-out old rakes haunt the presence of their former mistresses. He wandered slowly along the roads with his crazy old gait, and remained standing for hours at the edge of a field, supporting himself on his two sticks. Then he would drag himself to another field, and again become absorbed in motionless contemplation, looking like some gnarled old tree growing there, and withered by age. His dim eyes were no longer capable of distinguishing clearly between oats and wheat and rye. Everything seemed blurred and fogged to him, and even his recollections of the past were dim and con­fused. This field, he fancied, had yielded so many bushels in such a year, but he kept confounding dates and figures. He was constantly possessed by one bitter, haunting thought. The soil which he had so yearned for, and which he had won and possessed, the soil to which for sixty long years he had devoted everything — his limbs, his heart, his very life — this ungrateful soil had passed into the arms of another lover, for whom it now brought forth plentifully without reserving aught for him. A deep sadness overwhelmed him at the thought that it knew him no longer, that he retained not a particle of it, nothing even of what it had produced, neither a copper nor a mouthful of bread. And now he would soon have to die and rot away beneath it, beneath that fickle in­different soil which would drain fresh youth from his old bones! It had really not been worth his while to wear himself out with hard toil and labour when this was the end of it all — utter penury and infirmity! Whenever he had thus made the round of his old fields, he returned home and threw himself on his bed, so overwhelmed that he could not even be heard breathing.

He was deprived of this last interest he took in life when he lost the use of his legs. It soon became so painful to him to walk about that he scarcely went beyond the village. There were three favourite spots where he was fond of sitting on fine days — the logs in front of Clou’s farriery, the bridge over the Aigre, and a stone bench near the school. He tottered slowly from one to another of these halting-places, taking nearly an hour to go a couple of hundred yards, and dragging his wooden shoes after him as though they were heavy carts, as he shambled painfully along in the crazy wreck of his frame. Wrapt in oblivious abstraction, he frequently sat on the end of a log for a whole afternoon, huddled up, and feasting on the sunshine. His eyes were open, but he remained motionless in a kind of drowsy stupefaction. Passers-by no longer took any notice of him, for he had ceased to be a living creature, he was merely a thing. Even his pipe had become a burden to him, and he had almost ceased to smoke. The pressure of the stem upon his gums pained him, and the labour of filling and lighting quite exhausted him. His one desire was to sit perfectly motionless, for as soon as he stirred, even in the full warmth of the noon-day sun, he felt frozen and began to shiver. His power of will and his authority had already perished, and he was now in the last stage of decrepitude, leading a mere animal life, like some old brute suffering amid abandonment from the fact of having once led the life of a human being. However, he made no complaints, realising that a foundered horse, though it may once have worked well, is sent to the knacker’s as soon as it makes no return for the oats it consumes. Old folk, in a like way, are good for nothing, and are only a source of expense, so the sooner they are out of the way the better. He himself had wished for his father’s death; and now if his children, in their turn, impatiently awaited his own, it neither surprised nor hurt him. It was natural that this should be the case.