Green Mare

Nine

Honore and Juliette in the barn were threshing corn with flails. At first Honore had not wanted his daughter to help with what was really man’s work. He said that the corn was so ripe that a mere touch would be enough to shake it out of the husk; and that if necessary, seeing that they were in a hurry because the household was almost out of flour, he would get in a man to help. But day-labour was not easy to come by in Claquebue at harvest-time, and, as Adelaide said, one thinks twice about taking on men who want thirty-five sous a day and their food: and then take the chance of stuffing themselves at another man’s table so that they can scarcely do their work. Adelaide had decided to help with the threshing herself. But tough and stringy though she was, she lacked muscle and the youthful suppleness which alone can replace habit, apart from the fact that childbearing had distended her stomach muscles so that the effort hurt her. After half an hour her blows with the flail grew weak, losing their rhythm, and with every stroke she risked hitting herself on the head.

“For God’s sake drop it!” said Honore. “You’re getting in my way and that’s about all you’re doing.”

So Juliette had insisted on taking her mother’s place.

“I won’t try to do more than I can manage. When I’m tired I promise I’ll stop.”

Honore had laughed as he looked at her. She was a good big wench, no denying it, but still young and tender as the white flesh of a fowl. He let her try just to see how she would get on, just for the fun of it, laughing privately at the thought that she would very soon have had enough. But too proud to give way, she had not flagged all the morning. Once she had got her hand in the flail had fallen steadily, with no break in its rhythm. She had worked like a man.

It was nearly as hot in the barn as outside. Juliette was clad in a long, sleeveless smock, tied round her waist with string. Sweat made it cling to her body the length of her back and down to her calves. When she lifted her flail her breasts were pressed against the thin cotton, always in the same place, the nipple protruding at the centre of two circles of sweat the size of saucers. Father and daughter brought down their flails alternately, each time with a grunt, but in the throat only, to avoid opening their mouths. A fine dust rose up from the straw and filled their noses; and their mouths were filled with it whenever they were obliged to open them, so that their tongues and throats were as dry and rough as tinder.

Adelaide brought in drinks for them at regular intervals, filling these rest-periods with her indignation.

“Well, you can be quite sure the Malorets aren’t making their daughter work! I’ve seen her, the hussy, going round in a flowered apron and high-heeled shoes, and wriggling her bottom the way you’d think she’d been brought up in a chateau!”

“You can tell us about it some other time,” said Honore.

He dabbed wine and water on his neck, sniffed a little up his nose to clear it, and tossing the glass onto a heap of straw picked up his flail again. Adelaide went off still loudly vociferating, filled with fury and prophecy. Never had she felt her wrath to be more righteous. The night before Honore had told her everything. They had lain side by side on their bed, turning and tossing in the heat that rose up out of the earth and lay oppressively upon the room, and with his head full of the business, as it had been for the past two days, so that he could no longer keep it to himself, he had told her the whole story from the beginning. He had told it all, murmuring to her on the pillow, the arrival of the Prussians, the creaking of the mattress above his head, down to this most recent development, the stealing of the letter. And having finished he had started again, and they had grown so heated, so worked up over the behaviour of that Bavarian sergeant, that he had clutched her to him and the night had become riotous. .

In the kitchen, as Adelaide meditated on her night and her anger, Clotilde appeared, peeping round the door with a face at once timid and sullen. Adelaide hung her milk-skimmer on the edge of the pan and seized the child and dragged her into the light.

“Let’s see your tongue. I thought as much! All the trouble I take to keep you well!. . The first day it rains you shall have a good dose!”

Adelaide considered it unwise to administer a purge in very hot weather: the body is full of dangerous matter which may easily turn to acid and corruption. A touch of the sun on top of a purge and the oil may go to the heart or get mixed with the blood. One had knowm it to happen. That was how' old Another Domine’s man had died: on a fourteenth of July it was; he’d w^ranted to give himself a proper clearing out, and the three tablespoons of castor-oil had churned all day in his stomach, and in the evening he’d broken out into a sweat, all ready to die at midnight, which is what he did. And a man you’d have said was good for another twenty years.

Clotilde gazed at her mother in terror, recalling the time last year when Ernest had held her nose while the spoon was thrust into her mouth. With tears in her eyes she addressed a prayer to Heaven. “Please, God, it isn’t true that I want a dose. I go quite easily. Please don’t let it rain, not ever!. .” Adelaide went out to take more drink to the threshers. Clotilde cut short her prayer, chuckled and bolted for the dining-room, where she locked herself in.

Adelaide found father and daughter seated on a pile of cornsheaves with their hands hanging limp between their knees.

“I can’t even spit, I’m so dry,” said Honore. “Look! You see? No spit at all!”

“I’m just as bad,” said Juliette. “If anything, I’ve got even less spit.”

Adelaide thrust glasses into their hands, condoling and scolding.

“Look at the state you’re both in! That child with her smock wringing wet! But what can you expect when you go threshing in this heat? Oh, I know we needed to get it done. We can’t afford to wait, like some people. Some people are lucky, with little sluts to make money for them, we all know how! They can wait to do their threshing when it’s cooler in the barn!.

Honore and Juliette gulped their drinks without listening, smiling at one another in animal content.

“And then when the threshing's done there’s the winnowing, and tearing yourself apart to keep the fans going — up and down, up and down, and never mind if you rupture yourself! But they won’t have that trouble at all. They’ve bought a machine. A machine! With slut-money I need hardly say!”

“It’s a useful thing to have, a winnoxving-machine,” said Honore abstractedly.

J

“Useful! All you’ve got to do is turn the handle and the work does itself! Yes, and so now they’ve got a winnow-ing-machine, and that’s not all. .

Honore laid a hand over his daughter’s shoulders and pulled her towards him, saying with a smile:

“Well, that’s fine, they’ve got a winnowing-machine. So they won’t die of winnowing, but all the same they’ll die of something else. Us, we leave half the harvest standing because we’ve got to thresh out corn right away. Well, and so what? We’re hanging our tongues out in the barn while the Malorets are hanging theirs out in the sun, getting in the rest of the harvest. There’s only one thing to worry about, and that is if our corn gets rained on. Otherwise what odds does it make whether you’ve got a winnowing-machine or not? It’s just work all day, whatever happens. You work to earn your living, and you work for the sake of work, because it’s the only thing you know how to do. I’m not complaining. I like work and I’ve got plenty ahead of me. Let’s have the rest of the bottle. It’s hot.”

Adelaide refilled the glasses, and said after a moment of silence:

“I like work too, but all the same there are things you get angry about when you know you’ve kept yourself decent and nothing on your conscience.”

Honore clinked his glass in jest against Juliette’s, emptied it and said with a wag of his head:

“Well, when it comes to consciences. . well, I suppose so. I’m not saying, mind you, that the Malorets aren’t muck, and they’ll be hearing from me before long. What’s more, they aren’t going to enjoy it as much as they did Ferdinand’s letter. Those swine-”

Juliette lifted her head from his shoulder and said sharply:

“Why do you call them swine? It’s an easy thing to say!”

Honore looked at her, taken aback and at once perturbed. She stood up and tightened the string round her waist as though she were making ready for battle. Angered by this sudden rebellion, Adelaide said:

“In my young days if a girl had taken that tone of voice to her father she’d have been on the way to getting her ears boxed!”

“You don’t have to insult people just because a letter has been lost,” said Juliette. “And even if Zephe did take the letter, that’s no reason why you should be down on the whole family.”

“They’re all exactly the same,” said Adelaide. “You find you’ve got to deal with first one and then another.”

At this Honore jumped to his feet and, standing over his daughter, said violently:

“No, my God, not first one and then another! The whole lot of ’em, the whole bunch of Malorets together! D’you understand?”

Juliette changed countenance and stammered:

“Yes, I understand, but. . but you don’t know, you can’t know-”

Honore saw that she had turned pale and that her lips were trembling.

“Come on,” he said and picked up his flail, his own lips trembling a little.

Adelaide took Juliette’s hand and tried to lead her out of the barn.

“There’s still work to be done,” said Juliette, jerking her hand awav. “Leave me alone.”

Site took her flail and started again, and Adelaide departed. The threshing proceeded as before, with the same steady and monotonous rhythm. But the alternate beat of the flails on the threshing-floor could not fill the troubled silence that now separated father and daughter. They glanced sidelong at one another, not meeting each other’s eyes, angry and distressed. Now and then Honore would utter a grunt to keep the pace going, and Juliette would echo it, bringing down her flail. But presently it seemed to him that her voice had grown weaker, so that her grunt was like the whimper of a child. He let go his flail and cried:

“Juliette!”

She went on beating.

“Juliette. .” he said gently.

She looked up at him with eyes filled with tears.

“I just wanted to say — the Malorets-”

He drew her to him, pressing her weeping face to his chest.

“Don’t say anything.”

“I just wanted to say. .”

He clasped her more tightly, feeling her hot cheek against his breast. Juliette tried for a moment more to struggle free, but then yielded, her body shaken with sobs. He picked her up in his arms, as he often did in play, and carried her to the pile of sheaves, where she lay face down with her hands over her eyes. Honore picked up his flail again, and setting his teeth in wretchedness worked single-handed until midday.

In Honore’s household love was like the wine from a family vineyard: each one drank from his separate glass, but it engendered an especial intoxication that one brother could recognize in another, the father in the son, pervading the air they breathed like a voiceless song. There were mornings when the parents made ready for the day’s work with slumberous, happy faces and the children at their meal saw the joy in their mother’s heart. “So all went well last night!” They did not say it or even dare to think it, but they knew it and were glad. On those mornings laughter came easily. Or perhaps it was one of the boys who came home of an evening and took his place at table, silent and starry-eyed. No questions would be asked, but the others would glance at him covertly to share a little in the pleasure sleeping in his tired flesh. Honore would wink at his wife, but only when he was sure the boy was not looking, not wishing to embarrass this bringer of warmth into the house. And Adelaide would shrug her shoulders and say nothing, as though she were cross at seeing her son still flushed and his eyelids heavy with still-warm delight. To think how little he had once been, the great lump, and now look at him, chasing after the girls, and what with, I ask you! She would shrug her shoulders and move her saucepans gently so as to cause no disturbance, while the blood beat a little faster at her pulses, in part because her husband had winked at her: those two, father and son, one as bad as the other! Leaning over her cooking-stove she would laugh silently at the thought of that wink; and when the meal was ended the two smallest, seeing their mother languid and soft-eyed, would come and lay their heads in her lap and so fall asleep, and she would not dare to move and her tenderness would cast a spell upon all the house. .

But no such community of happiness existed in the home of Ferdinand in Saint-Margelon. Each went his separate and private way in search of love, and of them all only the father concerned himself w'ith the secrets of the others, and only to persecute them. His restless scrutiny, directed at his wife no less than at the children, w’as never for an instant relaxed. “You were over ten minutes in the lavatory,” he would say, with his watch in his hand. But despite his suspicions this remained the safest place: none of them went there without experiencing, mingled with their shame, a sense of release: sheltered from that probing eye they w^rere free to pursue their untrammelled thoughts, their private dreams and pleasures. And these interludes of escape and solitude, filled with the drab images conjured up in apprehensive minds, came to bear a dismal resemblance to one another, as though their form and frequency, their very substance, were imposed upon them by a sort of family discipline.

They made use in their fantasies of such materials as their daily life afforded: for example, of the neighbours. There lived in the house opposite a policeman and his wife. He was a man who stood well over six feet, with shoulders wide enough to fill a doorw^ray. His wife had a bosom which prevented her seeing the ground, a most noble billowing, roundly conducive to imaginative flights. On Sunday mornings Frederic and Antoine would get up early and wait separately in ambush behind their respective window-curtains to see her, bare-armed and in a rose-pink corset, thrust open the shutters of her bedroom. Her arms were huge and faintly mottled. She would pause for a moment gazing dowm into the street, leaning with her hands on the window-ledge, the ample flesh constricted in deep folds at her armpits. But what excited the two boys was the pink corset. Nothing was to be seen of what was inside the corset, because its massive, out-thrust contents were covered by a decorously cut chemise: but one could imagine! During a long period Frederic and Antoine separately observed this Sunday-morning manifestation, each unaware that the other was doing the same. They might have continued in ignorance had not Ferdinand, entering Antoine’s room on tip-toe one morning, caught him at the window and seen what he was looking at. Prompted by the sixth sense which he had in these matters, he had rushed at once into Frederic’s room and found him similarly employed. Flinging wide the window he had leaned out and called in a ringing voice:

“Go back into your room, Madame! Get away from the window at once!”

The policeman’s wife had not at first understood, and had remained staring in considerable bewilderment at this shame-ravaged countenance emerging so suddenly from the house opposite.

“Will you go back into your room!” screamed Ferdinand. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Madame— you ought to be ashamed!”

Still unable to gather what he was talking about, and being most curious to know, she had leaned out a little farther, bringing her bosom entirely over the window-ledge and causing a certain undulation within the corset. Ferdinand nearly had a seizure. Dreadful consequences ensued. The policeman came within an ace of being dismissed the service; he had to move and was never promoted sergeant. As for the two boys, in addition to going without dessert for six months and being made to copy out the funeral oration to Henrietta Maria of England fifteen times, they suffered the further humiliation of being escorted to and from school every day by the servant. They never again set eyes on the pink corset, and consoled themselves by spending an extra five minutes in the privy on Sunday mornings.

Ferdinand himself could not enter the privy without being instantly assailed by the consciousness of sin that seemed to pervade it. Could he have done so, he would have confiscated his sons’ genitals and only lent them back to them, for perhaps five minutes a month, when they were married and set up in life. But his suspicions were not confined to Frederic and Antoine. They were directed no less at Lucienne and his wife, and with no less justification.

Lucienne had settled the matter in her mind. For her there existed beneath the lowering heavens one small, locked place where without any twinge of remorse she might allow her thoughts to dwell upon the burly form of the policeman. Her conscience did not accompany her into this retreat, and what went on there was no business of her confessor or of the Demoiselles Hermeline; nor did the least reference to it ever appear in her book of Conscience Scrutiny. When she thought about the matter at other times her only real regret was that the policeman should be a person of inferior social status. She had tried to substitute the Colonel of Hussars and other more suitable figures, but being unable to evoke their images at the appropriate time and place had been obliged to abandon the attempt. Only the policeman would do. It must be said, however, that she indulged in no great imaginative debauches. Her ignorance of physical facts was such as reflected the utmost credit upon the moral tone and high standard of conduct prevailing in the establishment of the Demoiselles Hermeline. The policeman’s role was merely that of a witness, unaccountably sympathetic, of sins so instinctive and of such innocence that they warranted no flicker of the flames of Hell, and scarcely even a hint of Purgatory. The real danger lay in this process of detachment, since it might be foreseen that a time would come when sins more searching and more real would be consigned to the same limbo of forgetfulness.

But there was no hope that Mme. Haudouin would ever forget the policeman. Her husband’s embraces gave her no pleasure. In the early days of their marriage she had been deluded by Ferdinand, whose initial access of enthusiasm was due largely to his astonishment at the loss of his virginity. The haste induced by his excessive modesty had left her invariably unsatisfied; but this was something which she hoped time and experience would cure. No doubt she was in any case a little disappointed. Among the girls at the Demoiselles Hermeline’s establishment it was the generally held belief that love was something to be consummated on elegant sofas in rooms of the boudoir kind. Moreover her parents, town-dwellers for two generations, were addicted to a slightly coarse freedom of speech and behaviour, indulging in pats and cuddles and murmured asides which led Helene to suppose that love-making, even conjugal, was something that did not take place except when the way had been prepared.

From the outset she had to give up all thought of sofas and any other embellishment which might foster the illusion of a decorative caprice arising out of an elegant tete a tete. Such flights were not for Ferdinand, who considered that the place for love-making was in bed and at the time when it was reasonable to be in bed. And before getting into bed he made use of the chamber-pot. This was the only occasion when he could expose himself without discomfort in the presence of his wife, being encouraged and confirmed in the state of mind by all the generations of Haudouins who had acted likewise. It was a straightforward act, without mystery, and the sound of splashing water to which he was accustomed from his earliest childhood greeted his ears like a song of bourgeois tranquillity. Helene, however, did not easily grow accustomed to it. He might, she considered, have taken his precautions a little easier (as a cavalry officer would have done!). But all this was relatively unimportant. What seriously mattered was that Ferdinand made no attempt to repair the clumsiness due in the first place to his inexperience. His groping and unaided fumblings sometimes hurt and never satisfied her. He took his hasty pleasure for himself alone, disregarding her murmured protests and angrily rebuffing her attempts to assist, since to him the thought of her active connivance was outrageous. The act of the flesh was to him a shameful commerce transacted in unmentionable physical regions where the hand, the instrument of consciousness, must play no part.

So by degrees Mme. Haudouin had reverted to the habits of her girlhood, associating with them the image of the policeman, whose robust form and amiable, bovine countenance were in soothing contrast to those of her husband. The entry of Lieutenant Galais into her life made no difference. Helene could not allow herself to picture him in a role reserved for the flesh alone, and her love for him continued on a high, romantic plane. Despite her husband's political affiliations, she continued to be extremely devout and attended Communion several times a year. She confessed with the utmost particularity, sometimes to an elderly priest who, scarcely listening, sent her away with words of reassurance, and sometimes to a younger one who studied her case minutely, seeking to find a remedy. Once, when she was spending a few days at Honore’s house, she confessed to the cure of Claquebue. He exhorted her to resignation, and in words of great tact gave her to understand that no course could be more truly wise or Christian than her evocation of the policeman. He refused to see in it any sin of intention, or even so much as an evil thought, but considered it rather the reverse side of a wifely modesty that was wholly admirable.