I
The grey rainy sky seemed to press down on the vast brown plain. The scents of autumn, the melancholy scents of bare wet earth, fallen leaves and dead flowers, made the stagnant evening air duller and heavier. The peasants were still working, scattered through the fields, and waiting for the hour of Angelus: it would recall them to the farms whose thatched roofs showed here and there through the branches of the bare trees that sheltered the orchards from the wind.
At the edge of a road, a very small child sat on a heap of clothes, legs apart, playing with a potato that every now and then he let fall into his frock, while five women, bent double, with rumps in the air, were setting out colza seedlings in the nearby field. Moving slowly and methodically all down the big trench that the plough had just turned up, they thrust in a pointed wooden stick; the plant, already a little withered and lying limply over on its side, was thrust into the hole; then they covered up the root and went on with their work.
A man walking past, a whip in his hand, his feet thrust into sabots, stopped beside the child and lifted him up to be kissed. At that, one of the women straightened herself and came to him. She was a big red-faced girl, large of hip and waist and shoulder, a tall Norman female, with yellow hair and florid skin.
She spoke in a decided voice.
“Hullo, Césaire; well?”
The man, a slight sad-faced boy, murmured:
“There’s nothing doing, as usual.”
“He won’t?”
“He won’t.”
“What you going to do?”
“How do I know?”
“Go and see the priest.”
“All right.”
“Go and see him right now.”
“All right.”
They stood looking at each other. He was still holding the child in his arms. He kissed it again and set it down once more on the women’s clothes.
Across the skyline, between two farms, moved a horse plough driven by a man. Beast, machine and labourer passed with slow easy movements across the sombre evening sky.
“What’d he say, your dad?”
“He said he wouldn’t have it.”
“Why wouldn’t he have it?”
With a gesture the boy drew her attention to the child he had just set down on the ground, then with a glance he indicated the man behind the distant plough.
“Because your brat’s his,” he said slowly.
The girl shrugged her shoulders. “Lord, doesn’t everyone know it’s Victor’s? And what o’ that? I got myself into trouble. Am I the only one? My ma was in trouble before me, and yours too, before she married your dad. Who hasn’t got themselves into trouble about here? I went wrong with Victor, but didn’t he catch me in the barn when I was asleep? And then I went wrong again when I wasn’t asleep. I’d ha’ married him, I would, if he hadn’t been a servant. Am I any the worse for that?”
The man said simply:
“I want you as you are, I do, with or without the brat. It’s only my dad that’s against it. But I’ll get over that.”
“Go and see the priest at once,” she answered.
“I’m going.”
And he lumbered off with his heavy countryman’s gait; while the girl, her hands on her hips, went back to planting colza.
The fact was that the man now walking away, Césaire Houldrèque, son of old deaf Amable Houlbrèque, wanted, against his father’s will, to marry Céleste Lévesque, who had had a child by Victor Lecoq, a mere servant lad employed at the time on her parents’ farm, and dismissed for that very reason.
In the fields, moreover, caste divisions do not exist, and if the servant is thrifty, he can take a farm himself and become the equal of his old master.
So Césaire Houlbrèque went off, his whip under his arm, chewing the cud of his thoughts, and lifting one after another his heavy wooden shoes slimed with mud. He was sure he wanted to marry Céleste Lévesque, he wanted her with her child, because she was the woman he needed. He couldn’t have said why, but he knew it, he was sure of it. He had only to look at her to be convinced of it and feel all strange and stirred up, and half dazed with happiness. It even gave him pleasure to kiss the little boy, Victor’s little boy, because he was born of her body.
And he stared without any resentment at the distant outline of the man driving the plough at the edge of the sky.
But old Amable would not have the marriage. He opposed it with the pigheaded obstinacy of a deaf man, a fury of obstinate rage.
In vain Césaire had shouted in his ear, the ear that could still hear a little.
“I’ll look well after you, dad. I tell you she’s a good girl, a decent girl, and a good manager too.”
“As long as I live,” the old man repeated, “I’ll not see it happen.”
And nothing could persuade him, nothing could break down his savage determination. One hope only was left to Césaire. Old Amable feared the priest because he dreaded the death he felt approaching. He feared little enough the good God, or the devil, or hell, or purgatory, of which he had the haziest notions, but he feared the priest, who stood in his mind for the day of his burying, very much as a man might dread doctors through a horror of disease. For the past week Céleste, who knew this weakness of the old man, had been urging Césaire to see the priest; but Césaire had hesitated, because he was not himself very fond of black gowns; in his mind they stood for hands always outstretched for alms or for the holy bread.
He had made up his mind now, however, and he went towards the rectory, turning over in his mind how he would set forth his business.
Father Raffin, a small active priest, thin and always clean-shaven, was waiting for his dinner hour and warming his feet in front of his kitchen fire.
He merely turned his head as he saw the peasant come in, and demanded:
“Well, Césaire, what is it you want?”
“I want to talk to you, Father.”
The man stood there, daunted, his cap in one hand and his whip in the other.
“Talk, then.”
Césaire looked at the servant, an old woman dragging one foot after the other as she laid a place for her master on a corner of the table before the window.
“It’s—it’s, as you might say, a confession,” he stammered.
At that, Father Raffin looked closely at his peasant; he noticed his confused face, uneasy bearing and wandering eye, and ordered:
“Marie, go to your room for five minutes while I talk to Césaire.”
The servant flung an angry look at the man, and went off muttering.
“Now,” the priest added, “let’s hear all about it.”
The lad still hesitated, staring at his sabots, twisting his cap; he made up his mind abruptly:
“It’s like this. I want to marry Céleste Lévesque.”
“Well, my lad, what’s to prevent you?”
“It’s dad won’t have it.”
“Your father?”
“Yes, my dad.”
“What did your father say to you?”
“He said she’s had a babby.”
“She’s not the first since our mother Eve to have that happen to her.”
“A babby by Victor, Victor Lecoq, the servant at Anthime Loisel.”
“Ah, ah … so he won’t have it?”
“He won’t have it.”
“Not at any price?”
“No more’n an ass that won’t budge, saving your honour.”
“What did you say to him, to persuade him?”
“I said to him she was a good girl, and decent, and a good manager.”
“And that didn’t persuade him. So you want me to speak to him?”
“That’s just it. You talk to him.”
“And how shall I talk to your father?”
“Well … as if you were preaching to make us give our pennies.”
To the peasant mind the sole end of religion was to unloosen purses and empty men’s pockets to fill the coffers of heaven. It was a sort of vast trading house where the priests were the salesmen, as cunning, shifty and sharp as anyone, carrying on business for the good God at the expense of the country folk.
He knew quite well that the priests were of service, of great service to the poorest, the sick and the dying, helping, consoling, advising, sustaining, but all as a matter of money, in exchange for white coins, lovely shining silver paid out for sacraments and masses, advice and protection, pardon for sins and indulgences, purgatory and paradise depending on the income and the generosity of the sinner.
Father Raffin, who knew his man and was by no means disturbed, began to laugh:
“Very well, I’ll go and tell my little tale to your father, but as for you, my lad, you’ll have to come to church.”
Houlbrèque stretched out his hand and swore he would:
“If you fix this for me, I promise I will, on a poor man’s word.”
“That’s a good lad. When do you want me to come and see your father?”
“The sooner the better, tonight if you can.”
“In half an hour, then, after supper.”
“In half an hour.”
“That’s settled, then. Goodbye, my lad.”
“Goodbye, Father; thank you.”
“None at all, my lad.”
And Césaire Houlbrèque returned home, his heart eased of a great load.
He leased a small, a very small farm, for his father and he were not well off. They kept one servant, a fifteen-year-old girl who made their soup, looked after the poultry, milked the cows and churned the butter, and they lived sparsely, although Césaire was a good husbandman. But they did not own enough land or enough stock to do more than make both ends meet.
The old man had given up working. Melancholy, as the deaf are, riddled with aches and pains, bent, twisted, he wandered through the fields, leaning on his stick, regarding man and beast with a harsh scornful stare. Sometimes he sat down on the edge of a ditch and remained there for hours, motionless, his thoughts drifting among the things that had been his whole life, the price of eggs and corn, the sun and the rain that spoiled or brought on the crops. And, racked with rheumatism, his old limbs still sucked up the dampness of the soil, as for seventy years they had sucked up the moisture exhaled from the walls of his low thatched cottage, roofed, too, with damp straw.
He returned home at dusk, took his place at the end of the table, in the kitchen, and when he had in front of him the earthenware bowl that held his soup, he grasped it in bent fingers that seemed to have taken on the curved shape of the bowl, and winter and summer he warmed his hands on it before beginning to eat, so as to lose nothing, not one particle of warmth that came from the fire which cost so much money, nor a drop of the soup that took fat and salt to make, nor a morsel of the bread that was made from the corn.
Then he climbed up a ladder to the attic where he had his mattress, while his son slept downstairs, in the depths of a sort of niche near the chimney-place, and the servant shut herself in a kind of cell, a black hole which had once been used for storing potatoes.
Césaire and his father rarely spoke to each other. Only from time to time, when it was a question of selling a crop or buying a calf, the young man consulted the old one, making a speaking-trumpet of his hands and shouting his reasons into his father’s ear; and father Amable approved or disapproved in a slow hollow voice issuing from the pit of his stomach.
Césaire approached him after this fashion one evening as if it were a question of acquiring a horse or a young cow and conveyed to him, shouting in his ear at the top of his voice, his intention of marrying Céleste Lévesque.
At that, the old man was angry. Why? On moral grounds? Probably not. A girl’s virtue is lightly enough esteemed in the country. But his avarice, his deep-rooted savage instinct to thrift, revolted at the idea of his son bringing up a child who was not his own. His mind had leaped instantly to the thought of all the soup the child would swallow before he was old enough to make himself useful on the farm; he had reckoned up all the pounds of bread and all the pints of cider that the youngster would eat and drink until his fourteenth year; and he felt growing in him a crazy resentment against Césaire who had thought of none of these things.
He answered, in a voice of unwonted vigour:
“Have you taken leave of your senses?”
Then Césaire had set himself to enumerate his reasons, to relate Céleste’s good points, and prove that she would save a hundred times the cost of the child. But the old man doubted the existence of these merits, while he could not doubt the existence of the child, and he reiterated stolidly, without offering any further reasons:
“I’ll not have it! I’ll not have it! You’ll not do it as long as I’m alive.”
And for three months they stuck at that deadlock, neither giving way an inch, and once a week, at least, they went over it all again, with the same arguments, the same words, the same gestures, and the same futile result.
It was after this that Céleste had advised Césaire to go and ask their priest’s help.
When the young peasant got home he found his father already at the table, for his visit to the rectory had delayed him.
They dined in silence, sitting opposite each other, ate a little butter on their bread after the soup and drank a glass of cider; then they sat motionless on their chairs, in the dim glimmer of the candle brought by the little servant to give her light to wash the bowls, dry the glasses and cut chunks of bread in preparation for the breakfast eaten at dawn.
There was a knock at the door: it opened immediately and the priest appeared. The old man lifted uneasy distrustful eyes, and, with a foreboding of danger, started to climb his ladder, but Father Raffin put a hand on his shoulder and yelled in his ear:
“I have a word to say to you, old Amable.”
Césaire had disappeared, profiting by the door left open by the priest. He did not want to listen, so much he dreaded the discussion; he did not want to feel his spirits gradually sinking with each obstinate refusal of his father; he preferred to learn the truth, good or bad, in one word afterwards; and he went out into the darkness. It was a moonless starless evening, one of those misty evenings when the air feels heavy with moisture. A faint smell of apples hung round the yard, for it was the time when the earliest apples were gathered, the euribles, as they say in the cider country. As Césaire walked past the walls of the cowsheds, the warm smell of living animals asleep in the straw floated through the narrow windows; and by the stable he heard the stamping of the horses, and the sound of their jaws snatching and chewing the oats from the mangers.
He walked straight ahead, thinking about Céleste. In his simple mind, where ideas were hardly more than images born of direct contact with objects, thoughts of love took form only when he evoked the image of a big red-haired girl, standing in a sunken road, laughing, hands on hips.
It was thus he had seen her on the day when he first desired her. He had, however, known her since they were children, but never before this morning had he taken any particular notice of her. They had talked for some minutes; then he left her, and as he walked away, he kept on saying to himself: “Christ, that’s a fine girl all the same. A pity she went wrong with Victor.” He thought about it until evening, and all the next day as well.
When he saw her again, he felt a tickling sensation at the bottom of his throat, as if a feather had been pushed down his mouth into his chest; and after that, every time he found himself near her, he was surprised at the nervous tickling feeling that invariably attacked him.
Three weeks later he decided to marry her, so taken was he with her. He could not have said what had roused in him this overweening desire, but he expressed it by saying: “I’m possessed by her,” as if the passion he bore within him for this girl was mastering him like an evil spirit. He did not mind at all that she had lost her virtue; it was only so much the worse; it did not spoil her; and he bore no ill will to Victor Lecoq for it.
But if the priest failed, what was he to do? He dared not think about that, so tortured was he by anxiety.
He had reached the rectory, and he sat down near the little wooden fence to wait for the priest’s return.
He had been there perhaps an hour when he heard footsteps on the road, and despite the blackness of the night, he soon made out the still blacker shadow of a cassock.
He stood up, his legs trembling under him, afraid to speak, afraid to be told.
The priest saw him and said gaily:
“Well, my boy, it’s all right.”
Césaire stammered:
“All right … it can’t be.”
“Yes, my lad, but not without some trouble. What an obstinate old donkey your father is!”
“It can’t be,” the peasant repeated.
“But it is. Come and see me tomorrow noon, to arrange for the banns.”
The man had seized the priest’s hand. He gripped it, shook it, crushed it, babbling: “Indeed, indeed, indeed, Father … on the word of an honest man … you’ll see me next Sunday in church.”