Green Mare - 1933

Thirteen

Seeing that the time was half-past six, Adelaide went to wake Gustave and Clotilde, scolding them for their laziness as she made them jump out of bed. As if they couldn’t get up by themselves! As if she hadn’t enough to do, without having to be fussing over two great big children! While she scolded, Gustave pretended to whistle derisively, this being part of the game.

“Mummy, Gustave’s whistling!” said Clotilde.

“You wait till I catch him! He’s going to get such a smack!”

It was only at this hour that she could spare time to play with the children. She ran after Gustave, and holding Clotilde’s hand made a barrier to prevent him escaping through the door; and when he was caught they pretended to spank him and pull his ears. In the old days she had carried them into the kitchen, one on each arm, but now she said she could no longer manage it. They had grown so much that she couldn’t do it any more. She would have dearly loved to be still able to carry them, and even complained a little because they were so big (they really were big for their age). It would be the same with these as with the others. She had carried them as long as she could, until in the end they had grown too heavy for her. But since these were the last, and more likely than not there would be no more at her age, she still carried one, the one that seemed most to want to be carried, or else taking them in turn. And sometimes she still carried them both.

“You’re going to have breakfast and then you’re going off to watch over the cows. They’re your job now that Alexis has started to work with his father. We’re trusting them to you because we know you’re sensible children, and not naughty and silly like some.”

When breakfast was over Adelaide untied the cows and stood watching the children’s departure with the herd. The dog ran to and fro, maintaining order and heading them in the right direction, and its presence afforded her some reassurance. She was never quite easy in her mind at the thought of them, still so small, left to their own devices in the meadows and down by the river.

“Don’t have anything to do with Tintin Maloret. If he tries to talk to you keep close to Prosper iMesselon.”

“All right, Mummy.”

She called her last word to Gustave when they were almost out of earshot.

“Don’t forget you’re the biggest!”

She went back into the kitchen thinking that, since she had a little time to spare, she would clean out the diningroom. She set to work with a sudden anger at the thought that to-morrow the Deputy, Valtier, would be using the room for his assignation with Marguerite Maloret. After dusting the furniture she took the glass cover off the clock and polished its gilt with a rag, and saw as she did so that dust had somehow crept under the cover onto the pedestal. Someone must have removed the cover and then not put it back properly. She pushed her duster beneath the feet of the clock, into the gap between it and the pedestal, and brought it out with Ferdinand’s letter. Her first thought was that it must be a love-letter hidden there by Juliette or even by Alexis. With a little tremor of lighthearted inquisitiveness, she opened it and read aloud: “My dear Honore, — The black horse was taken with colic at the beginning of the week. . ”

She read with some difficulty, being little accustomed to reading, and was slow to grasp the meaning of what she read. It took her more than twenty minutes to get to the end. When at length she had done so she felt none of the relief which a sudden change in the situation as between the Haudouins and the Malorets might have been expected to afford her.

“After all, Honore is right,” she reflected, sighing a little. “He must deal with that affair. I don’t want to know what is going on.”

She slipped the letter back under the clock, gave a last touch to the figures of Agriculture and Industry, and replaced the cover, taking care to set it properly in its groove.

Zephe’s daughter, wearing a blue dress and a flowered apron, emerged from the woods an hour before midday, and Honore, who was working in the fields with Juliette and Alexis, watched her with interest. Walking with a light and airy step she went diagonally across the Champ-Brule, jumped the ditch and came out onto the road opposite the Haudouins’ house. Honore said to Juliette:

“It looks as though she was calling on us.”

“To arrange about meeting the Deputy, I suppose.”

“Well, you’d better go back. I don’t know how your mother will treat her. When one has arranged to receive people in one’s house one has to be civil to them. So try to be polite.”

“I’d do it for my own sake,” said Juliette. “I’m probably going to be her sister-in-law someday.”

“Hurry up! We’ll talk — about that some other time.”

Honore’s misgivings were not groundless. Adelaide, who was busy in the garden, observed the girl’s approach with a malicious satisfaction. She finished filling her basket with beans, taking her time over it, and then went into the yard. Marguerite came towards her with a demure smile of greeting.

“I thought I’d call, Adelaide. I can see you’re well.”

Adelaide stood contemplating the dress and the flowered apron with an exaggerated air of admiration.

“How pretty you are, my dear! You must have found a good job in Paris.”

Marguerite, still smiling and with no sign of embarrassment, turned on her heels so that the dress might be fully seen and said:

“I think you know the business I’ve come about.”

Adelaide knew perfectly, but hoping to disconcert her said:

“Business? What business? Do tell me.”

“I’m meeting M. Valtier here to-morrow afternoon. But perhaps I shouldn’t have told you, if Honore has said nothing.”

“Oh, of course, the Deputy has sent for you! It had quite slipped my mind. Well, you’ve only got to come and wait for him in the dining-room, and if he feels like amusing himself Alexis can spread some clean straw in the cowshed. We wouldn’t want to stop you earning your living, as I’m sure you realise.”

Marguerite flushed, still struggling for self-control, but her anger was too much for her.

“That’s very kind of you, Adelaide, but I’m not asking you to lend us your bed!”

The conversation then warmed up. By the time Juliette arrived her mother was exhorting Marguerite to make the most of her silks and satins while she had them, because she would certainly end in the gutter where she belonged, and Marguerite was saying that when it came to risking ending up in the gutter or living one’s whole life on top of the midden until one came to look like part of it she was quite ready to take her chance. Juliette interposed herself between the two women, kissed Marguerite and said tranquilly:

“I think I arrived just in time. You’d have been quarrelling in another minute!”

“It was partly my fault,” said Marguerite, who had recovered her self-possession. “Perhaps I didn’t explain properly.”

A meaningful look from her daughter gave Adelaide the strength to proceed with more diplomacy.

“This is a bad place to be talking anyway, with the sun so hot. . ”

“Yes,” said Juliette. “Come indoors for a minute, Marguerite.”

“I’ll leave you, then,” said Adelaide. “You’d better go into the dining-room. The fire’s been going under the copper all the morning, and it’s nearly as hot in the kitchen as it is out here.”

Zephe’s daughter gazed with a respectful interest round the dining-room, where no member of the Maloret family had ever before penetrated. While she explained the purpose of her visit she was admiring the sideboard, the round table, the carved chairs and the gilt clock, with no thought of comparison between these and the elegant furniture Valtier had bought her. Pointing to the two portraits hanging over the chimney-piece she said:

“They’re famous men, aren’t they?”

“Yes,” said Juliette. “The one on the right is Jules Grevy, and the one on the left is Gambetta.”

“And where’s the picture of the Green Mare?”

“It used to be between them, but now it’s at Saint-Margelon, in Uncle Ferdinand’s apartment. If you’d like to see a photograph.

Juliette got out the album, and laying it on the table turned over the pages. Marguerite caught sight of the picture of a sharpshooter in a flat cap, leaning in a dashing attitude on his rifle.

“Isn’t that Honore?”

“Yes.”

“Let me see. He was good-looking, wasn’t he? He hasn’t changed much.”

“And yet that was taken over fifteen years ago. But it’s true — he hasn’t changed much.”

Marguerite was sorry she had not come an hour earlier, she would have enjoyed lingering over the pages of the album. She wandered round the room, determined to miss nothing, and said as she paused in front of the chimney-piece:

“The clock’s stopped.”

Juliette glanced at it, her heart beating a little faster at the thought of the letter. Marguerite touched the glass cover wih her finger-tips, itching to wind the clock up but not liking to say so.

“And so,” said Juliette, “Monsieur Valtier will be here at half-past one to-morrow?”

“No, at three. He’s not likely to be earlier. He’s coming from Saint-Margelon after lunch with your uncle.”

“All the same, it is half-past one,” said Juliette, flushing slightly. “Uncle Ferdinand said so in the letter we had yesterday. If you like I’ll come and fetch you at one o’clock.”

Marguerite smiled and put her arm round Juliette’s waist.

“It’ll be the first time you’ve ever come to fetch me. When we went to school I used to wait for you at the end of our lane, and if you’d gone on you used to leave a stone at the foot of the first apple-tree. You were never the one who waited!”

Her voice was soft and Juliette allowed herself to be drawn against the flowered apron, entrapped, as she met the gaze of the smiling eyes, into a momentary tenderness.

“Sometimes we’d come back from school by ourselves,” murmured Marguerite, “and we’d go along the path between the hedges, do you remember. .?”

Her cheek touched Juliette, and with an abrupt movement she raised her arms to lay them round the girl’s neck. Juliette, scarlet-cheeked, was on the verge of yielding; but then she pushed her back, holding her at the full extent of her brown arms.

“It’s nearly twelve. You’ll be late home.”

Marguerite, her eyelids fluttering, sought to blink back the tears that had dismayingly arisen. She murmured: “Well, then, you’ll come to fetch me. At least you’ll have a chance of seeing Noel. Are you in love with him?” Juliette let her arms fall and made as if to turn away. “You can tell me,” said Marguerite. “You are in love with him, aren’t you?”

“Are you in love with Valtier?”

Marguerite laughed.

“Oh, me — that’s quite different! You know what I am, and just now your mother made no bones about saying it!” Picking up her skirts she displayed the open-work stockings, the lace-trimmed drawers, laughed on a higher note and said:

“You needn’t think I’m grumbling!”

Juliette and her mother were watching her vanish round the corner of the road when Honore entered the yard.

Alexis was helping Gustave and Clotilde to drive the cows into the cowshed. Juliette, with calculation, gave her father an account of Marguerite’s visit.

“I’ve never known a girl so barefaced!” commented Adelaide. “You should have heard the high-and-mighty way she talked to me, lording it over us all! The truth is, they think they can do just what they like, now they’ve got that letter of Ferdinand’s.”

“I’m sure she doesn’t know about it,” said Honore. “It wouldn’t be like Zephe to have told her, he’s too cautious.” “Well, I think she does know! You’ve only got to ask Juliette the way she talked to me.”

“Of course she knows,” said Juliette. “And the proof is that she asked me what I was going to do about Noel as though she were giving me orders. It’s no good pretending. They’ve got the letter, and they’re making use of it!” Honore tugged furiously at his moustache, uttering dark threats. Clotilde and her brothers had drawn near and were following the conversation with a passionate interest.

“They’re taking advantage now Ernest isn’t here,” said Alexis treacherously. “Now there’s no one to get back on them.”

His father gave him a look so menacing that it caused him to retreat, but Clotilde said calmly:

“Papa, this morning Tintin tried to touch me under my dress.”

Adelaide uttered a cry of horror. They all gathered round Clotilde, who said:

“Well, he did. He tried to touch me!”

“Is that true, Gustave?” roared Honore. “Speak up, can’t you?”

“Well, I don’t exactly know,” stammered Gustave, seeming disconcerted. “I didn’t really see… It could have been, but I didn’t exactly. .” Perceiving that this reply was disappointing his audience, he added hastily: “Well, anyway, I shouldn’t be in the least surprised if it was true. It’s just what you’d expect of Tintin. He doesn’t care what he does with the girls. And that’s something I have seen!” The same might have been said of all the urchins on the plain, including Gustave himself; but his words evoked an appalled murmur. Adelaide snatched up her daughter and promised her that she should never again go down to the meadows. Clotilde, who had not foreseen this disaster, at once tried to take back what she had said, but Adelaide carried her hastily into the kitchen, drowning her voice with her own.

Honore stood motionless, clasping his horny hands together while he glared like a wild animal over the plain as it lay scorching beneath the sun. Juliette drew near to him and murmured:

“I told Marguerite I’d fetch her at one o’clock to-morrow, so she could be here at half-past.”

The families in Claquebue numbered ninety-five. There were the Durs, the Corenpots, the Rousseliers, the Hau-douins, the Malorets, the Messelons. . but I have no need to name them all. The feeling between different families, whether of hatred or of friendship, was ascribed to various reputable causes — material interests, political opinions, religious beliefs. But in fact these feelings reflected above all the emotional dispositions of the individual families and their attitude towards sex. The cure was well aware of this, and never failed to take it into account in his relentless battle for the salvation of their souls, dividing the families into three categories. There were first of all those who were un-Catholic in their approach to, and their indulgence in, the pleasures of the flesh: such families were lost to the Church, and even their more virtuous members, devout thought they might be, represented a threat to religion. Then there were those at the opposite pole who yielded to fleshly impulses only with that furtiveness which is inspired by the fear of God, tormented families kept with little effort upon the true path: their members, borne upon the good tide, might with little danger be guilty of the blackest sins, since these were no more than passing deviations. Finally there were those in between, the hesitant families, tending now in one direction now in the other, torn this way and that, sinning, repenting and sinning again: these, the majority, had need of all the cure’s care.

He was the only one to possess any clear perception of this sexual countenance worn by each separate family, which for his convenience he classified under these three heads. The families themselves were only subconsciously aware of it, and this was also true of individuals. Nevertheless, when Honore Haudouin said of the Alalorets that they were a filthy lot, he was not indulging in mere abuse: without precisely knowing it he was stigmatising habits of sensuality which differed from those prevailing in his own family, and which shocked him.

Although the members of a family — the word is to be interpreted here as meaning household — might differ among themselves in matters of detail, the father preferring fair hair and plumpness, for example, and the sons dark hair and willowiness, they shared as though they were one flesh certain attractions and aversions where other families were concerned. The case of the Haudouins and the Malorets was by no means exceptional. There were plenty of others, although generally of a less extreme kind, to bear witness to the cure's perspicacity. The Durs, for example, lived next door to the Berthiers in the middle of the village. They were ardent priest-lovers with a son and two daughters. The Dur boy had seduced one of the Berthier girls, and although he did not much like her he retained a happy memory of the occasion. The elder Dur girl genuinely detested all the Berthier males and would have nothing at all to do with them, but the younger one was on covertly friendly terms with them. From this one might infer that the individual Durs differed widely in their attitude to the Berthiers: but it did not alter the fact that when their father apostrophised the Berthiers as “revolutionary rabble,” he could count upon his children’s sympathy. All were conscious of what underlay his ful-minations, an ingrained family rancour and mistrust. All felt obscurely threatened in their sexual inheritance, their common stock of minor vices, their especial and private mode of coming to terms with their desires, while concealing them, as decency required, from the light of day. They felt themselves threatened by a certain cynicism implicit not merely in the words and looks of the Berthiers but in their very silences. They seemed always to carry their arms at the ready, so to speak, and one could never stop oneself remembering that their women were naked under their clothes' This rendered the Durs uncomfortable: thev had an acutely mortified feeling that the Berthiers suspected the existence of the shameful and grubby secrets which they forgave themselves.

“Revolutionary rabble!. said old Dur; but although it was all ostensibly a matter of politics and of going or not going to Church, the first Berthiers who had stopped attending Mass, like the first Messelons to espouse the cause of the Republic, had been really proclaiming an attitude to the pursuit and performance of sexual love. When old Berthier inveighed against the Durs and their creeping-jesus airs his remarks were certain to include a juicy reference to certain regions of the body, and the tone of voice in which he uttered the word “reactionary” denoted primarily his scorn for suspected amorous procedures which he held to be preposterous. Moreover all the Republicans (I am speaking of a time forty-five years ago, when political opinions in Claquebue were not yet deeply rooted)— all the Republicans suspected their adversaries, not precisely of being impotent, since they reproduced themselves, but of functioning on a diminished and miserly scale. The reactionaries, for their part, held the radicals to be the prey of monstrous appetites, addicts of licentiousness, disdainers of the hereafter: and with a secret element of jealousy in their attitude, like that of a virtuous woman for an unmarried girl who flaunts her laden belly.

“Revolutionary rabble!” said old Dur; and “Reactionary blackbeetles!” said old Bertheir. . Pure eyewash, all of it!. . Can anyone seriously suppose that two families living side by side for sixty years, seeing each other day after day, can continue to think of each other solely in terms of politics or the confessional? People such as the Berthiers and the Durs, the Corenpots and the Rousseliers, spending their sweat sixteen hours a day on the soil, expecting nothing more of life than their own aching bones can wrest from it, have little time for the narrow contemplation of foreign affairs or eternity. In Claquebue true faith, whether religious or political, was bom in the loins: beliefs originating in the mind were simply notions, opportunist stratagems wedded to neither hatred nor friendship and capable of being revised to suit the times, as old Hau-douin had known how to do. The people seized upon Radicalism, Clericalism, Royalism or General Boulanger as they seized upon the pretext of a boundary hedge, simply as a means of asserting that in their family sexual love was approached in a certain way. The jMesselons waxed ferocious over Alsace-Lorraine, and the downfall of tyrants and priests, because for them this was a way of making love: for old Philibert, indeed, it was the only way left, and he continued to practise it until the last breath left his body.

At the time when I was in Claquebue, Jules Haudouin had a bull named Etendard (all the subsequent Haudouin bulls bore the same name) who won prizes at cattle shows. From my post of observation between Jules Grevy and Gambetta I often had occasion to admire him, sometimes in the performance of his duties. The sight of any moving object or bright colour so enraged him that he had to be securely tied to prevent him charging. When he was in his eighth year, old Haudouin decided to fatten him for the butcher, and Ferdinand came especially from Saint-Alargelon to geld him. A week later I watched him pass by the dining-room window. Poor Etendard! He might have been a mock bull in a carnival! The children scampered under his nose, the dog ran between his feet, and you might have flapped a red rag at him till you grew tired without causing him to pause in his placid chewing of the cud. He had lost his political opinions!

I have referred to the Durs, the Berthiers and Etendard merely in order to make myself clear on the subject of the Haudouins and the Malorets. Until 1870 no matter for dispute had ever arisen between the families. They had never had occasion to quarrel over a field or a woman. When they met they spoke to one another civilly and even amiably. The hatred between them was confined within the walls of their respective houses, where each individual felt closer to their common usage in love, the family consciousness. There were evenings, the Haudouins being gathered together in their kitchen, when the mere name of Maloret, casually spoken, gave rise to the sense of a marauding threat proceeding from the enemy’s dwelling:

the flesh was troubled as though bv the expectation of an insidious embrace, repugnant vet a little hoped-for. This feeling, brief and evanescent though it was, gave rise to confused and disturbing images. The Haudouins pictured certain attitudes, not in terms of individuals — Zephe or N oel or Ana'is — but of the Maloret familv as a whole, visions extending bevond evervdav realitv. When Honore said of the.Malorets that the\^r were a queer lot he could not have given precise reasons for the mistrust which his words implied, but thev touched a chord in every member of his household.

One of the things which had caused Honore to stay away from Mass — it also disturbed his wife and children — was the presence of the Malorets in church. They made for the Communion table like people pushing their way into a circus, alwavs the first to rise from their pew, a solid block, a familv. Thev were alwavs first at the altar rails, getting ahead of evervone else, and when thev returned to their places it was with an air of having taken possession of God, of having him so to speak locked in their stomachs and committed to the condonation of their private indulgences. To the Haudouins this was very apparent, and Honore was doing no more than express the family feeling when, in terms of high-flown pleasantry, he described how Zephe had deflowered his daughter, Marguerite, first sending his wife off with a chicken for the cure, then waiting while the weeping girl finished her prayers, and finally joining her in the Lord's Prayer while he removed his breeches. The fiction exactly fitted the Haudouins’ conception of the two-faced brazenness of the Malorets. who seemingly did not indulge in even the most lamentable depravities except with God's express consent. Even Ferdinand, who was not a member of Honore’s household and could not hear the ribald tale without blushing and protesting, derived from it a certain satisfaction.

Until 1870, then, the two families had had no more than obscure, passing intimations of the particular nature of the hatred that divided them. Zephe was the first to know the truth, on that day when he encountered the German patrol. The body of men marching four-square towards him to the rhythmic tread of jack-boots had impressed him with its virile strength. His head filled with the tales of rape and pillage that were circulating in the district, he thought of the Haudouins’ house, where the two sharpshooters had just taken refuge: and it seemed to him weak and vulnerable as a woman tormented by an honourable lie, a predestined victim of the male. He was overtaken by a sudden and violent impulse to let these men loose upon the house, to delegate to them his desire to humiliate the Haudouins in their very flesh. He certainly did not desire Honore’s death, and given time for reflection would not have betrayed him. The words had escaped his lips before he could hold them back.

Honore had been deeply afflicted by his mother’s shame, and still more by the fact that he had been a witness of it. But he did not regard the event itself as a catastrophe, or consider her disgraced, even when due allowance had been made for the pleasure the encounter afforded her. He might have thrust the whole matter out of his mind, classing it among the vicissitudes of war, had not Zephe’s treachery been at the bottom of it. For in this he made no mistake. Monstrous though the idea might seem, he had never doubted that the betrayal had been prompted by the thought of sexual violence and had had no other purpose. Without being able to put it into words, he was convinced that the Maloret family had violated his mother by proxy.

The victim was the only one to carry the story to the confessional. Zephe had seen no reason to do so, observing that he had done nothing except tell the Bavarian the truth, which must be accounted to his credit, and was guiltless even of a pious lie or one of omission. The cure, sufficiently informed by old Mme. Haudouin, was not ignorant of the silent hatred existing between the families, which threatened to explode in open conflict and perhaps in scandal. Although he had given the matter much thought he had been unable, to his annoyance, to find any pretext for warning or intervention. He could only hope for the triumph of the Malorets, who belonged to the category of trouble-free Catholics, and invoke God’s blessing on their behalf.