Nêne/Part 1/Chapter 10
CHAPTER X
ANOTHER Sunday; a Sunday in August, at the quiet hour of siesta.
Michael Corbier had thrown himself down on his barn floor, hat over eyes. The flies had kept him awake at first with their persistent noisy buzzing; now that he had fallen asleep they were busier than ever about him, but he had taken the precaution of burying his head in an armful of straw, so that only his hands remained exposed, and there the skin was hardened and almost insensible.
The sun was beating straight down; the two rows of piled sheaves were like the walls of an overheated passage. All that great heap of straw crackled, so ripe, so dry and baked it was. The sleeper gasped for air, oppressed by this furnace heat.
"Good God!"
He had wakened with a sudden nervous start. He did not stop to stretch himself; his eyes were wide open all at once.
"Good God! This is awful!"
He mumbled to himself, cross and upset, his mouth feeling dry and bitter.
Every time he took a nap in the heat of noon, it was the same thing. Could he never again defend himself against these dreams? Would he never again enjoy the sound sleep of a tired man?
No sooner did he lie down on that floor now, than he felt a strange softness flooding his veins.
At first vague forms came passing before his eyes, beings and objects that he could not have named: elfin forms swirling in satanic rounds; sarabands, wafting into his face an air charged with a hot, loathsome redolence that made his senses reel. Then, at last, he "saw clear." He did not see sometimes one thing, sometimes another; he always saw the same blue eyes, deep as sin, and then a whiteness that took shape, became a woman's throat, an amorous woman's throat, throbbing, swelling, growing—growing till it filled his whole vision with its vast, triumphant whiteness.
Then desire rose within him like a storm fiend.
Bolt upright, both shoulders freed of the straw, he took count of his shame. His grief over the death of his wife filled his heart.
"Marguerite, you know it isn't that I've forgotten you! You are with me when I work; your hand is still in mine, softer than the hands of all living women."
He crinkled his eyelids as if to fix more clearly the elusive visions of his happiness, to which he wanted to cling.
But other intruding thoughts besieged his brain. Vainly he tried to drive them off like annoying flies. They kept buzzing around in his head, vivid, obstinate, cruel.
He was glad when his father got up at the other end of the barn and came toward him. His father talked often and willingly of the time, not so long past, when life lay before Michael like a flowery path.
"Did you sleep, father?"
The old man sat down on the straw beside him.
"Not much: the flies are terrible. Did you?"
Oh! I!"
The phrase remained suspended and the father knew that the old heart-wound was again open. He did not stir, but his eyelids twitched.
There had never been any unpleasantness between father and son and they felt for each other a true, manly affection, a tenderness which, though silent, was watchful and deep.
The father was thoughtful for a moment, groping for words of comfort. Finding none that would satisfy him, he ended by saying:
"Better not borrow! Sell your harvest right away. The market is low, but it's better to sell than to borrow."
"What were you saying, father?"
"I say it'll give you cash in hand—at least two hundred pistoles. You can do a lot with a sum like that."
Michael made a gesture of disillusioned indifference. He was so far from all that! He thought:
"My purse is empty: why isn't my heart like my purse? Why is it bulging with worthless coin?"
"Well, now!" exclaimed the father, who misunderstood the gesture. "Well, now!—Two thousand francs, for certain, at least! It's a pretty penny.—You're another one of those fellows that cry before they're hurt."
Michael let him talk on, glad to have his mind brought back to these simple, homely cares.
Work-a-day troubles were a known enemy that you were used to wrestle with.
He began to do some counting, in an instinctive effort to get away from himself.
"Two thousand francs, that's at least three hundred less than the harvest is worth, and even so, it wouldn't be enough to make ends meet: there's 1,400 francs for the leasehold, 870 for the two hands; and how about the cost of threshing? And the hired girl?"
"Don't borrow; debts are the ruination of any farm!"
"Then what can we do? Sell something?"
That roused the old man.
"Sell! Not while I'm alive, you won't! The Chestnut Hill land has been in our family, time out of mind, the way the gentry have theirs. As for the two other parcels, your mother and I bought them. And how we toiled and sweated to get those few acres!"
"I toil and sweat too, father. I, too, break my back working the soil, oftener than I walk about with my head in the clouds. And all I see ahead is trouble, because I have no longer anyone but you who cares, and no hand to help me."
Beneath the gently spoken words, rebellion rang out clear. The father was moved to say:
"Poor boy, you're in hard luck, for certain. But it's no use being rebellious about it. A man can't rise up against it, nor yet lie down under it: he can only keep going—that's all."
"Well, I keep going, don't I!"
They fell silent, sitting quite still with their heads bowed, as proud men do to hide their emotion.
Then the father spoke again, falteringly, discreetly feeling his way.
"Sure enough, you're in bad luck—and you are a good fellow—you deserve better. If you didn't have to pay the wages of a hired girl—a first rate girl, too—things would be easier, maybe. Though, speaking of her, you're in luck there: your house isn't kept just any old way—like some houses I could mention."
"Pshaw! It's kept the same as other houses!"
"Now, let's be fair!—That girl—you wouldn't find her like, I tell you. I see how things go—I'm a good deal around the house.—Well, I couldn't fail to notice how much trouble she's taking. Look around! Everything is neat and tidy—Look at the stock, look at her dairy.—And besides, there's another reason why she's better than the others. She makes your children as comfortable and cosy as two kittens in the sun. I'm telling you just what I see, my boy."
"Maybe so, but a servant is a servant: You pay her wages and she quits. That kind of paid help can never be like—the other."
"All right, I don't say—But see here now, boy—when you're over your grief"
"I'll never get over it."
"You say that. And it's true, one never does get over it quite.—But a man argues himself out of it, bye and bye.—Do you mind if I speak out, Michael?"
"Of course not!" the young man said expectantly. "You, father, you can say anything at all to me."
"Well, son, you ought to marry again. Don't let that hurt you now! I don't say this year or next—you understand?—but when time has soothed you a bit. All the same, the sooner the better, for your house and for your children. You've got a good housekeeper, but as you say, she might leave any day."
"And must I marry her, then, to make her stay?"
Michael threw out the words quickly, angrily.
"I'm not speaking for her nor for any other woman I know. That's your affair. All I want to say, if you don't mind, is that you need someone like her—yes, that kind, sure enough—a good housewife who'll be kind to the children and who'll go with them to our chapel."
"Father, don't let's talk about it any more, please!"
He rose to his feet with a quick twist of his shoulders.
"There, now! I've made you angry!" mumbled the father.
"Angry? Not at all! I'm just going over there—walk a little.—My legs are all numb."
He went toward the farm buildings and around them, passing through the goat pasture in the rear. Everything neat and tidy, his father had said. He was forced to admit that so it was. Some wash was drying on the hedge, all carefully spread out. He noticed some dishcloths—mere rags, but washed very white. Why had she taken so much trouble over them? Did she think she might still make some use of them?
He took the path to the pond. On fine Sundays like this, he used to stroll along it with Marguerite and Lalie. In the shade of a big oak at the edge of the shimmering water, he had lived the tenderest hours of his life.
He reached the meadow,—found it as soft and springy as ever under his tread. He walked along the border hedge: as in other days, the hazel nuts were ripening in their little yellow cups,—just like the nuts he had held out to Marguerite at the tips of bent branches and that she had cracked between her pretty teeth. As in other days, there was the wagon gap in the hedge, beside a rowan-tree from which the blackbirds scurried; from that point you could see the pond and, leaning forward a little, the round top of that same oak in the shadow of which
"Ah!"
He stood still.
In the shadow of that great oak, at the edge of the shimmering water, a young woman in Sunday finery was playing with a little child—as in other days!