Complete Works of Emile Zola (957 page)

Lequeu, having listened with a reserved air, had already left, unwilling, as an official, to compromise himself any further. Fouan and Delhomme, with their faces over their liquor, breathed not a word; feeling ashamed, and knowing that if they interposed the sot would only shout the louder. The peasants at the surrounding tables were eventually getting angry. What! Their property wasn’t their own? It would be taken from them? And, growling, they were about to pummel the communist soundly and turn him out, when Jean rose up. He had not taken his eyes off the speaker, or missed one of his words, as he sat there listening with a serious face, as if seek­ing what justice might underlie these things that shocked him.

“Hyacinthe,” said he quietly, “you’d better hold your tongue. It’s not the sort of thing to say; and if by any chance you are right, you’re not very clever to put yourself so in the wrong.”

So wise a remark from so cool a speaker calmed Hyacinthe instantaneously. He fell back in his chair, declaring that, after all, he didn’t care a fig. He then began larking again: kissed Madame Bécu, whose husband was asleep with his head on the table, and finished up the punch, drinking out of the salad-bowl. The laughter had recommenced, amid the dense smoke, and he was voted a funny fellow, all the same.

At the far end of the barn, the dancing was still going on. Clou was still smothering the squeaky notes of the little fiddle with his thunderous blasts of trombone accompaniment. Sweat drained off the bodies of the dancers, and exhaled amid the ruddy smoke of the lamps. La Trouille, whirling about in turn in the arms of Nénesse and Delphin, was conspicuous by her red bow. Berthe, too, was still there, faithful to her gallant and dancing with no one else. In a corner, some young men whom she had cast off were tittering together. Oh, well; if that great gawky was willing, she did right to stick to him; there were plenty of others who, for all her money, would have certainly thought twice before marrying her.

“Let’s go home to bed,” said Fouan at last to Jean and Delhomme.

Outside, when Jean had left them, the old man walked on in silence, apparently pondering over all he had just heard. Then, abruptly, as if that had decided him, he turned to his son-in-law.

“I’ll sell the shanty and come and live with you. That’s settled. Good-bye!”

He went slowly home. His heart was heavy; as his boots stumbled over the dark road, a terrible sadness made him stagger like a drunken man. As it was, he had no land, and he would soon have no house. It seemed to him that people were already sawing down the old rafters and pulling off the slates from over his head. He now had not the shelter of a single stone left him; he was like a beggar wandering along the roads, by day and night, unceasingly; and when it rained, the chill, never-ending down-pour would fall upon his head.

CHAPTER IV

The bright August sun had been climbing the horizon since five o’clock, and La Beauce displayed its ripe grain under the glowing sky. Since the last summer showers, the green, ever­growing expanse had little by little turned yellow. It was now a tawny sea of fire, that seemed to reflect the flaming atmo­sphere: a sea that gleamed and swelled at the least breath of wind. Nothing but corn; corn to infinity, without a glimpse of house or tree! Now and then in the heat of the day, a leaden calm enwrapped the ears, while a fruitful odour rose smoking from the soil. The period of gestation was finishing; it could be realised that the swelling seed was bursting from the womb in warm, heavy grain. At sight of this mighty plain, this giant harvest, one felt uneasy as to whether man, with his insect-like form, so small amid such immensity, would ever be able to get through it.

During the last week, at La Borderie, Hourdequin, having finished his barley, had been engaged upon his wheat. During the previous year his reaping-machine had got out of order; and, discouraged by his servants’ hostility, and having himself grown doubtful as to the efficacy of machinery, he had had to provide himself with a staff of reapers since Ascension Day. According to custom, he had hired them at Mondoubleau, in Le Perche. There was the foreman, a tall, lean fellow, five other reapers, and six pickers-up, four of them women and two of them girls. A cart had brought them to Cloyes, where a con­veyance from the farm had gone to fetch them. Everybody slept in the sheep-cot — empty at that time of year — the girls, women, and men being all huddled together pell-mell in the straw, half-undressed on account of the great heat.

This was the season when Jacqueline had the most trouble. The sunrise and sunset decided the work of the day or the mor­row. They shook off their fleas at three in the morning, and returned to their straw at about ten at night. She always had to be up the first, for the four o’clock soup; just as she went to bed the last, after serving the heavy nine o’clock meal of bacon, beef, and cabbage. Between these two meals there were three others; bread and cheese at eight, soup again at twelve, a sop of milk by way of a snack in the afternoon. In all, five meals, copiously washed down with cider and wine, for the harvesters, who work hard, are exacting as regards their food. However, she merely laughed, as if stimulated by her duties. She was lithe like a cat, with sinews of iron, and her resistance to fatigue was all the more surprising, on account of her amours with that big lubber Tron, whose soft flesh whetted her appetites. She had made him her creature, and she took him into the barns, the hay-loft, and even the sheep-cot, now that the shepherd, whose espionage she feared, passed the night out-of-doors with his sheep. And withal she became more supple and active. Hourdequin neither saw nor heard anything. He was in his harvest fever, something out of the common, the great annual crisis of his passion for the soil. His brain became on fire, his heart beat fast, and his flesh quivered at sight of the ripe, falling grain.

The nights were so sultry that year, that sometimes Jean could not stay in the loft, where he slept, near the stable. He preferred to stretch himself, with all his clothes on, on the pavement of the yard. It was not merely the intolerable living heat of the horses, and the exhalations from their litter, that drove him outside; but sleeplessness, the ever-present image of Françoise, the constant idea of her coming, of his seizing her, and devouring her with his embraces. Now that Jacqueline, being busy elsewhere, left him to himself, his affec­tion for the young girl turned into a madness of longing. Scores of times, while he suffered at night-time, in a state of semi-somnolence, he swore that he would go the next day and win her; but, on rising up, as soon as he had dipped his head into a bucket of cold water, he thought it disgusting: he was too old for her. And then the next night the torture began again. When the harvesters arrived, he recognised among them a woman, now married to one of the reapers, with whom he had been familiar two years before, while she was yet a girl. One evening he slipped into the sheep-cot, and pulled her by the feet as she lay between her husband and her brother, who were both snoring open-mouthed. She got up and came to him, and they lay silently together in the sultry darkness on the trodden soil which, although it had been raked over, still retained, from the winter sojourn of the sheep, so keen an ammoniacal odour as to bring tears into one’s eyes. During the three weeks that the reapers were there, he came back to the sheep-cot every night.

After the second week in August, the work made progress. The reapers had started with the northern fields, and were working down towards those which bordered the valley of the Aigre. The immense stretch of corn fell sheaf by sheaf. Every cut of the scythe told, leaving a circular incision. The puny insects, seemingly lost amid their gigantic task, came forth from it in triumph. Behind them, as they slowly marched on­ward in line, the razed ground re-appeared, bristling with stubble, over which trampled the pickers-up, bending down. It was the season when there was the most gaiety about the vast sad solitude of La Beauce, now full of people and animated by the constant motion of labourers, carts, and horses. As far as the eye could reach, there were parties advancing with the same slant progress, with the same swinging of their arms; some so near that the swish of the steel was audible, others extending in black streaks, like ants, as far as the edge of the sky. On all sides gaps were appearing, as though the plain were a piece of cloth wearing into holes all over. Shred by shred, amid the ant-like activity, La Beauce was stripped of her court mantle formed of cloth-of-gold, her sole summer adornment, the loss of which left her desolate and naked. During the last days of the harvest, the heat was overpowering, especially one day when Jean near the Buteaus’ land, and, with his cart and pair, was removing some sheaves to a field of the farm where a large stack, six and twenty feet high, was to be built with some three thousand trusses. The stubble was splitting atwain with the drought, and the heat scorched the motionless wheat which was still standing. The latter seemed as if it were itself flaming with visible fire, in the quivering of the sun-rays. Not the shelter of a leaf; no shadow on the ground save the scanty ones of the toilers. Perspiring since the morning under this blazing sky, Jean had been loading and unloading his cart, without saying a word, simply glancing at each journey towards the field where Françoise, bending double, was slowly gathering behind the reaping Buteau.

Buteau had had to take Palmyre to help him; for Françoise did not suffice, and he could not rely on Lise, who had been in the family way for the last eight months. This had exasperated him. After all the precautions he had taken, how could it possibly have happened? He used to jostle his wife about, accusing her of having done it on purpose, and complaining lugubriously for hours together, as if some destitute wretch or stray animal were coming to eat him out of house and home. Although eight months had gone by, he never noticed Lise’s condition without abusing it. Curse the thing! A goose was not so stupid! It was the ruin of the household!

That morning she had come to help in the gathering; but he had sent her back, furious with her heavy, clumsy movements. She was to return, however, with the four o’clock snack.

“Good God!” said Buteau, who was bent on finishing a bit of ground. “My back’s baked, and my tongue’s a perfect chip.”

Then he straightened himself; his sockless feet were thrust into thick shoes, and he wore nothing but a shirt and canvas smock, the former hanging half out of the open smock and showing the hair of his sweating chest down to the navel.

“I must have another drink!” said he.

Then he took from under his jacket on the ground a quart bottle of cider, which he had sheltered there. At last, having swallowed two mouthfuls of the tepid drink, he thought of the girl.

“Aren’t you thirsty?”

“Yes.”

Françoise took a deep draught from the bottle without repugnance. While she bent backward, with her loins curved, and her rounded bust straining the thin material of her dress, he looked at her askance. She also was dripping with moisture, in a print dress half undone, the body being un­hooked at the top and showing her white flesh. Under the blue handkerchief with which she had covered her head and neck, her eyes seemed very large in her quiet face, glowing with the heat.

Without another word Buteau, with his hips swinging, re­sumed his work, felling a swath with every stroke of his scythe, the swish of which kept time to his tread. Stooping down again, she followed him, carrying in her right hand her sickle, which she made use of to gather up each armful of corn from among the thistles. At every three steps she laid the wheat regularly in bundles. Whenever he straightened himself, just long enough to pass the back of his hand over his brow, and saw Françoise too far in the rear, stooping, with her head quite close to the ground, in the position of an expectant animal, he called out to her in a husky voice, his tongue seemingly getting drier than ever:

“Now, then, lazybones! You ought to know better than to fool away your time like that!”

In the adjacent field, where for three days the straw of the bundles had been drying, Palmyre was engaged in binding the sheaves. He did not watch her; for, contrary to the usual practice, he had arranged to pay her per hundred sheaves, on the pretext that she was old and worn out, and had lost her strength, so that he should lose if he paid her by time — at the rate of a franc and a-half per day, which was what the younger women earned. Even to secure this piecework she had had to implore him; and he had taken advantage of her position, assuming the resigned air of a Christian performing a work of charity. The poor creature collected three or four bundles — as many as her shrivelled arms could hold — and then tightly tied the sheaf with a band she had prepared. This work, so fatiguing that it is usually reserved for the men, was exhaust­ing her. Her breast was crushed by the constant loads it had to sustain; her arms were strained by dint of embracing such massive bundles, and tugging at the bands of straw. She had brought with her in the morning a bottle, which she went and filled every hour or so at a neighbouring stagnant, poisonous pool; and she drank greedily of the water, in spite of the diarrhoea, which had torn her to pieces since the beginning of the hot weather, her health being already ruined by over-work.

The azure of the sky had grown pale, as if it were whitened by the heat; and burning coals seemed to fall from the sun, now glowing more fiercely than ever. It was the oppressive noontide hour of the siesta. Delhomme and his party, who had been stacking some sheaves near by — four below, and one to roof the others in with; — had already disappeared, and were all lying down in some hollow. For an instant longer old Fouan could be seen, still standing up. He had sold his house a fortnight previously, since when he had been living with his son-in-law, following the harvest-work with all the feverishness of yore. In his turn, he soon felt obliged to lie down, and also disap­peared from view. There was nothing remaining against the blank horizon, or the blazing background of the stubble, save the withered figure of La Grande, who was examining a tall stack which her people had begun to erect among a little tribe of smaller ones already partially pulled to pieces. She seemed like a tree hardened by age, with nothing to fear from the sun, as, without a drop of perspiration on her, she stood there bolt upright, feeling sternly indignant with the sleepers.