II
The wedding took place towards the middle of December. It was a simple one, since the pair had not much money. Césaire, all in new clothes, was ready at eight in the morning to go and call for his betrothed and take her to the registrar; but as he was too early, he sat down by the kitchen table and waited for those of his relations and friends who were to accompany him.
It had been snowing for a week, and the brown earth, already made fruitful by the autumn sowing, had turned livid and slept under a vast sheet of ice.
It was cold in the cottages, whose thatched roofs wore a white bonnet; and the round apple trees in the orchards looked as if they were in flower, powdered over as in the lovely month of their blossoming.
Today, the heavy clouds from the north, grey clouds swollen with fleecy showers, had vanished, and the blue sky opened on a white earth on which the rising sun flung silver rays.
Césaire sat staring in front of him through the window, thinking of nothing, quite happy.
The door opened, two woman came in, peasants in their Sunday clothes, the aunt and cousin of the bridegroom; then three men cousins, then a woman neighbour. They found themselves chairs, and sat silent and motionless, the women on one side of the kitchen and the men on the other, overwhelmed by a sudden timidity, the embarrassed melancholy that seizes people gathered together for a ceremony. Shortly one of the cousins asked:
“Isn’t it time?”
“I’m sure ’tis,” Césaire answered.
“Let’s be off, then,” cried another.
They rose to their feet. Césaire had been growing more and more uneasy: he stood up now and climbed the attic ladder to see if his father was ready. The old man, always up so early in the morning, had not yet put in an appearance. His son found him on his mattress, his eyes open and a malicious expression on his face.
He shouted right inside his ear:
“Come, dad, get up. It’s time to go to t’wedding.”
The deaf man murmured in a dying voice:
“I can’t. I’ve gotten such a chill it’s stiffened my back. I can’t move hand nor foot.”
The young man stared at him in horror, seeing through the manoeuvre.
“Come, dad, you must make yourself get up.”
“I can’t.”
“Here, I’ll help you.”
And he bent over the old man, pushed back the quilt, took him by the arm and lifted him up. But father Amable began to groan:
“Hou, hou, hou! The pain! Hou, hou, I can’t. My back’s all knotted up.”
Césaire realised that he could not do anything, and, furious with his father for the first time in his life, he cried:
“Very well, you won’t get any dinner, for I’m having a meal at Polyte’s inn. That’ll teach you to behave like a mule.”
And he scrambled down the ladder and set off, followed by his relatives and guests.
The men had turned up their trousers to keep the edges from getting sodden in the snow; the women held their petticoats well up, showing their thin ankles, their grey woollen stockings, and their bony shins, as stiff as broomsticks. The whole company rolled along in silence, one behind the other, picking their way with great caution, for fear of losing the road, which had quite vanished under the flat monotonous unbroken covering of snow.
As they approached each farm, they saw one or two people waiting to join them; and the procession grew longer and longer; it wound along, following the unseen line of the road, looking like a living rosary of black beads slithering over the white fields.
In front of the bride’s door, a number of people were stamping their feet while they waited for the bridegroom. They hailed him when he appeared; and Céleste came out of her room at once, dressed in a blue gown, her shoulders covered with a little red shawl, and wearing a wreath of orange-flowers on her head.
But everyone asked Césaire:
“Where’s your dad?”
He made the embarrassed answer:
“He couldn’t move with rheumatics.”
The farmers shook their heads, and looked at him with malicious incredulity.
They set off for the registrar’s. A peasant woman carried Victor’s child behind the future husband and wife, as if they were going to a christening; and the peasants, arm in arm now, in double file, made their way through the snow with the motion of a sloop on the sea.
After the mayor had married the betrothed in the little town hall, the priest proceeded to unite them in the modest house of God. He blessed their marriage and promised them a fruitful union; then he preached to them of wedded virtue, the simple healthy virtue of the country, work, peace and faithfulness, while the child, feeling the cold, whimpered behind the bride’s back.
The moment the couple reappeared on the threshold of the church, shots rang out in the cemetery moat. Nothing was visible but the barrels of the guns from which issued quick spurts of smoke; then a head emerged and looked at the procession; it was Victor Lecoq celebrating the marriage of his dear friend, congratulating her on her happiness and throwing her his vows with each flash of powder. He had recruited some of his friends, five or six hired men, to deliver these musketry salvoes. Everyone agreed that he was behaving very well.
The meal took place at the inn kept by Polyte Cacheprune. Twenty places had been laid in the big dining room where the people dined on market day; and the great joint turning on the spit, the birds roasting in their juice, the black puddings crisping on the clear hot fire, filled the house with a pungent fragrance, the smoke of red-hot charcoal spattered with drops of grease, and the strong heavy smell of country food.
They sat down at the table at noon, and the soup was soon poured into the plates. Faces were already animated; mouths opened to utter broad jests, eyes wrinkled up in malicious mirth. They were going to enjoy themselves, by God.
The door opened, and old Amable appeared. He looked spiteful and furiously angry, and he dragged himself along on his sticks, groaning at every step to let them see how he was suffering.
Everyone fell silent at sight of him, but all at once old Malivoire, his neighbour and a fat jolly man who knew everyone’s little ways, began to shout, as Césaire always did, making a speaking-trumpet of his hands: “Hey, old fox, you’ve a good nose, you have, to smell Polyte’s cooking from your house.”
A great laugh burst from the throats of the guests. Malivoire, excited by his success, went on: “There’s nothing like a plaster of black pudding for the rheumatics. It’ll warm your inside, with a glass of brandy. …”
All the men shouted, hammering the table with their fists, rolling with laughter, bending and straightening their bodies as if they were working at a pump. The women clucked like hens, the servants writhed with amusement as they stood by the walls. Only old Amable did not laugh, and waited, without replying, while they laid a place for him.
They put him in the centre of the table, facing his daughter-in-law, and he began to eat as soon as he was seated. It was his son who was paying, after all, and he must have his share of it. With each ladleful of soup that dropped into his stomach, with each mouthful of bread or meat chewed by his gums, with each glass of cider and wine that rolled down his gullet, he felt that he was getting back some of his property, taking back a little of his money that all these gluttons were devouring, saving a fragment of his possessions, in fact. And he ate in silence, with the obstinacy of a miser who hides halfpennies, with the gloomy tenacity that he used to bring to his persevering toil.
But all at once he saw Céleste’s child at the foot of the table, sitting on a woman’s knee, and his eyes never left it again. He continued to eat, his glance fixed on the little creature. The woman nursing him kept putting between his lips little bits of stew which he nibbled, and the old man suffered more from the few mouthfuls sucked by this grub than from all that the rest of the guests swallowed.
The meal lasted till evening. Then everyone went home.
Césaire helped old Amable to his feet.
“Come, dad, time to get home,” he said. And he put his two sticks into his hands. Céleste took the child in her arms, and they went slowly through the sombre night lit by the gleaming snow. The deaf old man, three parts drunk, and made all the more spiteful thereby, refused obstinately to get on. Several times he even sat down, with the idea that his daughter-in-law might take cold; and he groaned, without saying a word, delivering himself of a sort of long-drawn dolorous wail.
When they reached home, he climbed up to his attic at once, while Césaire made up a bed for the child near the wide nook where he and his wife were going to lie. But as the newly married pair did not go to sleep at once, they heard the old man tossing on his mattress for a long time, and several times he even spoke aloud, as if he were dreaming and giving away his thoughts despite himself, unable to keep them back, so obsessed he was by the one idea.
When he came down his ladder in the morning he saw his daughter-in-law hurrying round at work.
“Come, dad!” she cried; “hurry up, here’s some good soup.”
And at the end of the table she set a round black earthern pot full of steaming liquid. He made no reply but sat down and took up the scalding bowl, and warmed his hands on it as he always did. It was such a cold day that he even pressed it against his chest and tried to get a little of the quick heat of the boiling water into his old body that so many winters had stiffened.
Then he sought his sticks and went out into the frozen fields until noon, until dinnertime, for he had seen Céleste’s baby installed in a big soap box, still asleep.
He kept altogether to himself. He went on living in the cottage as before, but he bore himself as if he were no longer part of it, no longer interested in anything, regarding these people, his son, the woman and the child, as strangers whom he did not know and to whom he never spoke.
The winter dragged on. It was long and hard. Then the first days of spring burst the seeds; and once more the peasants, like industrious ants, spent their days in the fields, working from dawn to dark, in the northeast wind, in rain, along the furrows of the brown earth that bore in its bosom the bread of man.
The year promised well for the newly married pair. The crops pushed up thick and hardy; there were no late frosts; and the blossoming apple trees scattered over the grass a pink and white snow that foretold a bumper harvest.
Césaire worked very hard, rising early and going to bed late, to save the cost of a hired man. Sometimes his wife said to him:
“You’ll make yourself ill in the long run.”
“No, I’ll not,” he answered; “I’m used to it.”
But one evening he came home so exhausted that he had to lie down without any supper. He rose at the usual hour in the morning; but he could not eat, in spite of his fast of the night before; and he had to come home in the middle of the afternoon to rest again. During the night, he began to cough; and he tossed on his mattress, feverish, with burning forehead, and dry tongue, consumed with a frightful thirst.
He did, however, go as far as his fields at daybreak; but the next day the doctor had to be called in, and pronounced him very ill, and down with inflammation of the lungs.
He never left now the nook which served him for bedroom. He could be heard coughing, panting and tossing in the depths of his hole. A candle had to be carried to the opening, in order to look at him, to give him his medicine or apply a cupping-glass. Then his sunken face, disfigured by its growth of beard, became visible under a thick canopy of spiderwebs, which hung and floated, stirred by the draught. And the sick man’s hands lay on the grey bedclothes as if they were dead.
Céleste cared for him with an anxious activity, made him drink remedies, applied blisters, came and went in the house; while old Amable remained on the edge of his attic, peering from that distance at the dark hollow where his son lay and suffered. He would not come any nearer, for his hatred of the woman, and he squatted there sulking like a jealous dog.
Six more days went by; then one morning when Céleste, who slept now on two wretched heaps of straw, went to see if her man was better, she could not hear his hurried breathing coming from his hidden bed. Terrified, she asked:
“Now, Césaire, how’ve you been tonight?”
He did not answer.
She put out her hand to touch him, and felt the cold flesh of his face. A long wail broke from her, the long wail of a woman in mortal fear. He was dead.
At her cry, the old deaf man appeared at the top of his ladder; and seeing Céleste rushing out to bring help, he hurried down and touched his son’s face himself: the truth broke on him and he bent to fasten the door from the inside, to keep the woman from coming back to take possession of his home again, now that his son was no longer alive.
Then he sat down on a chair beside the dead man.
Neighbours arrived and shouted and knocked. He did not hear them. One of them broke a pane of the window and jumped into the room. Others followed; the door was opened again, and Céleste reappeared, weeping violently, with swollen cheeks and red eyes. Then old Amable, beaten, climbed back to his attic without saying a word.
The burial took place next day; then, after the ceremony, father-in-law and daughter-in-law found themselves alone in the farmhouse, with the child.
It was the usual hour for dinner. She lit the fire, prepared the soup, and set the plates on the table, while the old man sat in his chair and waited without appearing to notice her.
When the meal was ready, she shouted in his ear:
“Come, dad, we must eat.”
He rose, took his place at the end of the table, emptied his bowl, chewed his bread spread thin with butter, drank two glasses of cider and then went out.
It was one of those moist warm days, one of those beneficent days when life ferments, palpitating and blossoming, over the whole surface of the earth.
Old Amable followed a little path across the fields. He looked at the green shoots of corn and barley, and thought that his young lad was under the ground now, his poor young lad. He walked wearily along, dragging his legs and limping a little. And as he was alone in the fields, all alone under the blue sky, in the middle of growing crops, all alone with the larks he saw hovering over his head but whose airy song he could not hear, he began to weep as he walked.
Then he sat down near a pool and stayed there until evening, watching the little birds that came to drink; then, at nightfall, he went home, supped without saying a word and climbed to his attic.
And his life went on as in the past. Nothing was changed, except that his son Césaire slept in the cemetery.
What could the old man have done? He could not work now, he was only fit to eat the soup prepared by his daughter-in-law. And he swallowed it in silence, morning and night, glaring furiously at the child who sat facing him at the other side of the table and ate too. Then he went out, wandered over the country like a vagabond, went and hid himself behind barns to get an hour or two hours’ sleep as if he was afraid of being seen, then as dusk fell he came home.
But weighty anxieties began to fill Céleste’s thoughts. The fields needed a man to watch over them and work them. Someone ought to be there in the fields all the time, not just a hired man, but a real husbandman, a master, who knew his job and would have a real interest in the farm. A woman alone could not cultivate them, follow the prices of corn, direct the selling and buying of stock. Certain ideas came into her head, simple practical ideas, over which she pondered all night. She could not marry again before the year was up, and the immediate pressing needs must be attended to at once.
Only one man could help her in this quandary, Victor Lecoq, the father of her child. He was steady, and land-wise; with a little money in his pocket he would have made an excellent farmer. She knew that, having seen him working on her parents’ farm.
So one morning, seeing him going along the road with a load of manure, she went out after him. When he saw her, he stopped his horses, and she spoke to him as if she had met him only the day before:
“Good day, Victor, how are you today?”
“I’m all right,” he answered; “and how’s yourself?”
“Oh, me, I’d be all right if I wasn’t alone on the place, which worries me because of the land.”
Then they talked on a long time, leaning against the wheel of the heavy wagon. Now and then the man scratched his forehead under his cap and reflected, while she, with crimson cheeks, talked earnestly, setting forth her reasons, all her affairs, her future plans; at last he murmured:
“Yes, it could be done.”
She held out her hand like a peasant concluding a bargain, and asked:
“Is it settled?”
He gripped the outstretched hand:
“It’s settled.”
“On Sunday, then.”
“On Sunday.”
“All right; goodbye, Victor.”
“Goodbye, Madame Houlbrèque.”