VII
The morning was becoming terribly hot. In that huge rocky amphitheatre the sun kindled a furnace-like glare from the moment when the first fine weather began. By the planet’s height in the sky Abbé Mouret now perceived that he had only just time to return home if he wished to get there by eleven o’clock and escape a scolding from La Teuse. Having finished reading his breviary and made his application to Bambousse, he swiftly retraced his steps, gazing as he went at his church, now a grey spot in the distance, and at the black rigid silhouette which the big cypress-tree, the Solitaire, set against the blue sky. Amidst the drowsiness fostered by the heat, he thought of how richly that evening he might decorate the Lady chapel for the devotions of the month of Mary. Before him the road offered a carpet of dust, soft to the tread and of dazzling whiteness.
At the Croix-Verte, as the Abbé was about to cross the highway leading from Plassans to La Palud, a gig coming down the hill compelled him to step behind a heap of stones. Then, as he crossed the open space, a voice called to him: ‘Hallo, Serge, my boy!’
The gig had pulled up and from it a man leant over. The priest recognised him—he was an uncle of his, Doctor Pascal Rougon, or Monsieur Pascal, as the poor folk of Plassans, whom he attended for nothing, briefly styled him. Although barely over fifty, he was already snowy white, with a big beard and abundant hair, amidst which his handsome regular features took an expression of shrewdness and benevolence.*
Rougons.—ED.
‘So you potter about in the dust at this hour of the day?’ he said gaily, as he stooped to grasp the Abbé’s hands. ‘You’re not afraid of sunstroke?’
‘No more than you are, uncle,’ answered the priest, laughing.
‘Oh, I have the hood of my trap to shield me. Besides, sick folks won’t wait. People die at all times, my boy.’ And he went on to relate that he was now on his way to old Jeanbernat, the steward of the Paradou, who had had an apoplectic stroke the night before. A neighbour, a peasant on his way to Plassans market, had summoned him.
‘He must be dead by this time,’ the doctor continued. ‘However, we must make sure.... Those old demons are jolly tough, you know.’
He was already raising his whip, when Abbé Mouret stopped him.
‘Stay! what o’clock do you make it, uncle?’
‘A quarter to eleven.’
The Abbé hesitated; he already seemed to hear La Teuse’s terrible voice bawling in his ears that his luncheon was getting cold. But he plucked up courage and added swiftly: ‘I’ll go with you, uncle. The unhappy man may wish to reconcile himself to God in his last hour.’
Doctor Pascal could not restrain a laugh.
‘What, Jeanbernat!’ he said; ‘ah, well! if ever you convert him! Never mind, come all the same. The sight of you is enough to cure him.’
The priest got in. The doctor, apparently regretting his jest, displayed an affectionate warmth of manner, whilst from time to time clucking his tongue by way of encouraging his horse. And out of the corner of his eye he inquisitively observed his nephew with the keenness of a scientist bent on taking notes. In short kindly sentences he inquired about his life, his habits, and the peaceful happiness he enjoyed at Les Artaud. And at each satisfactory reply he murmured, as if to himself in a tone of reassurance: ‘Come, so much the better; that’s just as it should be!’
He displayed peculiar anxiety about the young priest’s state of health. And Serge, greatly surprised, assured him that he was in splendid trim, and had neither fits of giddiness or of nausea, nor headaches whatsoever.
‘Capital, capital,’ reiterated his uncle Pascal. ‘In spring, you see, the blood is active. But you are sound enough. By-the-bye, I saw your brother Octave at Marseilles last month. He is off to Paris, where he will get a fine berth in a high-class business. The young beggar, a nice life he leads.’
‘What life?’ innocently inquired the priest.
To avoid replying the doctor chirruped to his horse, and then went on: ‘Briefly, everybody is well—your aunt Felicite, your uncle Rougon, and the others. Still, that does not hinder our needing your prayers. You are the saint of the family, my lad; I rely upon you to save the whole lot.’
He laughed, but in such a friendly, good-humoured way that Serge himself began to indulge in jocularity.
‘You see,’ continued Pascal, ‘there are some among the lot whom it won’t be easy to lead to Paradise. Some nice confessions you’d hear if all came in turn. For my part, I can do without their confessions; I watch them from a distance; I have got their records at home among my botanical specimens and medical notes. Some day I shall be able to draw up a wondrously interesting diagram. We shall see; we shall see!’
He was forgetting himself, carried away by his enthusiasm for science. A glance at his nephew’s cassock pulled him up short.
‘As for you, you’re a parson,’ he muttered; ‘you did well; a parson’s a very happy man. The calling absorbs you, eh? And so you’ve taken to the good path. Well! you would never have been satisfied otherwise. Your relatives, starting like you, have done a deal of evil, and still they are unsatisfied. It’s all logically perfect, my lad. A priest completes the family. Besides, it was inevitable. Our blood was bound to run to that. So much the better for you; you have had the most luck.’ Correcting himself, however, with a strange smile, he added: ‘No, it’s your sister Desirée who has had the best luck of all.’
He whistled, whipped up his horse, and changed the conversation. The gig, after climbing a somewhat steep slope, was threading its way through desolate ravines; at last it reached a tableland, where the hollow road skirted an interminable and lofty wall. Les Artaud had disappeared; they found themselves in the heart of a desert.
‘We are getting near, are we not?’ asked the priest.
‘This is the Paradou,’ replied the doctor, pointing to the wall. ‘Haven’t you been this way before, then? We are not three miles from Les Artaud. A splendid property it must have been, this Paradou. The park wall this side alone is quite a mile and a half long. But for over a hundred years it’s all been running wild.’
‘There are some fine trees,’ observed the Abbé, as he looked up in astonishment at the luxuriant mass of foliage which jutted over.
‘Yes, that part is very fertile. In fact, the park is a regular forest amidst the bare rocks which surround it. The Mascle, too, rises there; I have heard four or five springs mentioned, I fancy.’
In short sentences, interspersed with irrelevant digressions, he then related the story of the Paradou, according to the current legend of the countryside. In the time of Louis XV., a great lord had erected a magnificent palace there, with vast gardens, fountains, trickling streams, and statues—a miniature Versailles hidden away among the stones, under the full blaze of the southern sun. But he had there spent but one season with a lady of bewitching beauty, who doubtless died there, as none had ever seen her leave. Next year the mansion was destroyed by fire, the park doors were nailed up, the very loopholes of the walls were filled with mould; and thus, since that remote time, not a glance had penetrated that vast enclosure which covered the whole of one of the plateaux of the Garrigue hills.
‘There can be no lack of nettles there,’ laughingly said Abbé Mouret. ‘Don’t you find that the whole wall reeks of damp, uncle?’
A pause followed, and he asked:
‘And whom does the Paradou belong to now?’
‘Why, nobody knows,’ the doctor answered. ‘The owner did come here once, some twenty years ago. But he was so scared by the sight of this adders’ nest that he has never turned up since. The real master is the caretaker, that old oddity, Jeanbernat, who has managed to find quarters in a lodge where the stones still hang together. There it is, see—that grey building yonder, with its windows all smothered in ivy.’
The gig passed by a lordly iron gate, ruddy with rust, and lined inside with a layer of boards. The wide dry throats were black with brambles. A hundred yards further on was the lodge inhabited by Jeanbernat. It stood within the park, which it overlooked. But the old keeper had apparently blocked up that side of his dwelling, and had cleared a little garden by the road. And there he lived, facing southwards, with his back turned upon the Paradou, as if unaware of the immensity of verdure that stretched away behind him.
The young priest jumped down, looking inquisitively around him and questioning the doctor, who was hurriedly fastening the horse to a ring fixed in the wall.
‘And the old man lives all alone in this out-of-the-way hole?’ he asked.
‘Yes, quite alone,’ replied his uncle, adding, however, the next minute: ‘Well, he has with him a niece whom he had to take in, a queer girl, a regular savage. But we must make haste. The whole place looks death-like.’
VIII
The house with its shutters closed seemed wrapped in slumber as it stood there in the midday sun, amidst the hum of the big flies that swarmed all up the ivy to the roof tiles. The sunlit ruin was steeped in happy quietude. When the doctor had opened the gate of the narrow garden, which was enclosed by a lofty quickset hedge, there, in the shadow cast by a wall, they found Jeanbernat, tall and erect, and calmly smoking his pipe, as in the deep silence he watched his vegetables grow.
‘What, are you up then, you humbug?’ exclaimed the astonished doctor.
‘So you were coming to bury me, were you?’ growled the old man harshly. ‘I don’t want anybody. I bled myself.’
He stopped short as he caught sight of the priest, and assumed so threatening an expression that the doctor hastened to intervene.
‘This is my nephew,’ he said; ‘the new Curé of Les Artaud—a good fellow, too. Devil take it, we haven’t been bowling over the roads at this hour of the day to eat you, Jeanbernat.’
The old man calmed down a little.
‘I don’t want any shavelings here,’ he grumbled. ‘They’re enough to make one croak. Mind, doctor, no priests, and no physics when I go off, or we shall quarrel. Let him come in, however, as he is your nephew.’
Abbé Mouret, struck dumb with amazement, could not speak a word. He stood there in the middle of the path scanning that strange solitaire, with scorched, brick-tinted face, and limbs all withered and twisted like a bundle of ropes, who seemed to bear the burden of his eighty years with a scornful contempt for life. When the doctor attempted to feel his pulse, his ill-humour broke out afresh.
‘Do leave me in peace! I bled myself with my knife, I tell you. It’s all over, now. Who was the fool of a peasant who disturbed you? The doctor here, and the priest as well, why not the mutes too! Well, it can’t be helped, people will be fools. It won’t prevent us from having a drink, eh?’
He fetched a bottle and three glasses, and stood them on an old table which he brought out into the shade. Then, having filled the glasses to the brim, he insisted on clinking them. His anger had given place to jeering cheerfulness.
‘It won’t poison you, Monsieur le Curé,’ he said. ‘A glass of good wine isn’t a sin. Upon my word, however, this is the first time I ever clinked a glass with a cassock, but no offence to you. That poor Abbé Caffin, your predecessor, refused to argue with me. He was afraid.’
Jeanbernat gave vent to a hearty laugh, and then went on: ‘Just fancy, he had pledged himself that he would prove to me that God exists. So, whenever I met him, I defied him to do it; and he sloped off crestfallen, I can tell you.’
‘What, God does not exist!’ cried Abbé Mouret, roused from his silence.
‘Oh! just as you please,’ mockingly replied Jeanbernat. ‘We’ll begin together all over again, if it’s any pleasure to you. But I warn you that I’m a tough hand at it. There are some thousands of books in one of the rooms upstairs, which were rescued from the fire at the Paradou: all the philosophers of the eighteenth century, a whole heap of old books on religion. I’ve learned some fine things from them. I’ve been reading them these twenty years. Marry! you’ll find you’ve got some one who can talk, Monsieur le Curé.’
He had risen, slowly waving his hand towards the surrounding horizon, to the earth and to the sky, and repeating solemnly: ‘There’s nothing, nothing, nothing. When the sun is snuffed out, all will be at an end.’
Doctor Pascal nudged Abbé Mouret with his elbow. With blinking eyes he was curiously observing the old man and nodding approvingly in order to induce him to talk. ‘So you are a materialist, Jeanbernat?’ he said.
‘Oh, I am only a poor man,’ replied the old fellow, relighting his pipe. ‘When Count de Corbiere, whose foster-brother I was, died from a fall from his horse, his children sent me here to look after this park of the Sleeping Beauty, in order to get rid of me. I was sixty years old then, and I thought I was about done. But death forgot me; and I had to make myself a burrow. If one lives all alone, look you, one gets to see things in rather a queer fashion. The trees are no longer trees, the earth puts on the ways of a living being, the stones seem to tell you tales. A parcel of rubbish, eh? But I know some secrets that would fairly stagger you. Besides, what do you think there is to do in this devilish desert? I read the old books; it was more amusing than shooting. The Count, who used to curse like a heathen, was always saying to me: “Jeanbernat, my boy, I fully expect to meet you again in the hot place, so that you will be able to serve me there as you have up here.”’
Once more he waved his hand to the horizon and added: ‘You hear, nothing; there’s nothing. It’s all foolery.’
Dr. Pascal began to laugh.
‘A pleasant piece of foolery, at any rate,’ he said. ‘Jeanbernat, you are a deceiver. I suspect you are in love, in spite of your affectation of being blasé. You were speaking very tenderly of the trees and stones just now.’
‘Oh, no, I assure you,’ murmured the old man, ‘I have done with that. At one time, it’s true, when I first knew you and used to go herborising with you, I was stupid enough to love all sorts of things I came across in that huge liar, the country. Fortunately, the old volumes have killed all that. I only wish my garden was smaller; I don’t go out into the road twice a year. You see that bench? That’s where I spend all my time, just watching my lettuces grow.’
‘And what about your rounds in the park?’ broke in the doctor.
‘In the park!’ repeated Jeanbernat, with a look of profound surprise. ‘Why, it’s more than twelve years since I set foot in it! What do you suppose I could do inside that cemetery? It’s too big. It’s stupid, what with those endless trees and moss everywhere and broken statues, and holes in which one might break one’s neck at every step. The last time I went in there, it was so dark under the trees, there was such a stink of wild flowers, and such queer breezes blew along the paths, that I felt almost afraid. So I have shut myself up to prevent the park coming in here. A patch of sunlight, three feet of lettuce before me, and a big hedge shutting out all the view, why, that’s more than enough for happiness. Nothing, that’s what I’d like, nothing at all, something so tiny that nothing from outside could come to disturb me. Seven feet of earth, if you like, just to be able to croak on my back.’
He struck the table with his fist, and suddenly raised his voice to call out to Abbé Mouret: ‘Come, just another glass, your reverence. The old gentleman isn’t at the bottom of the bottle, you know.’
The priest felt ill at ease. To lead back to God that singular old man, whose reason seemed to him to be strangely disordered, appeared a task beyond his powers. He now remembered certain bits of gossip he had heard from La Teuse about the Philosopher, as the peasants of Les Artaud dubbed Jeanbernat. Scraps of scandalous stories vaguely floated in his memory. He rose, making a sign to the doctor that he wished to leave this house, where he seemed to inhale an odour of damnation. But, in spite of his covert fears, a strange feeling of curiosity made him linger. He simply walked to the end of the garden, throwing a searching glance into the vestibule, as if to see beyond it, behind the walls. All he could perceive, however, through the gaping doorway, was the black staircase. So he came back again, and sought for some hole, some glimpse of that sea of foliage which he knew was near by the mighty murmur that broke upon the house, like the sound of waves.
‘And is the little one well?’ asked the doctor, taking up his hat.
‘Pretty well,’ answered Jeanbernat. ‘She’s never here. She often disappears all day long—still, she may be in the upstair rooms.’
He raised his head and called: ‘Albine! Albine!’ Then with a shrug of his shoulders, he added: ‘Yes, my word, she is a nice hussy.... Well, till next time, Monsieur le Curé. I’m always at your disposal.’
Abbé Mouret, however, had no time to accept the Philosopher’s challenge. A door suddenly opened at the end of the vestibule; a dazzling breach was made in the black darkness of the wall, and through the breach came a vision of a virgin forest, a great depth of woodland, beneath a flood of sunbeams. In that sudden blaze of light the priest distinctly perceived certain far-away things: a large yellow flower in the middle of a lawn, a sheet of water falling from a lofty rock, a colossal tree filled with a swarm of birds; and all this steeped, lost, blazing in such a tangle of greenery, such riotous luxuriance of vegetation, that the whole horizon seemed one great burst of shooting foliage. The door banged to, and everything vanished.
‘Ah! the jade!’ cried Jeanbernat, ‘she was in the Paradou again!’
Albine was now laughing on the threshold of the vestibule. She wore an orange-coloured skirt, with a large red kerchief fastened round her waist, thus looking like some gipsy in holiday garb. And she went on laughing, her head thrown back, her bosom swelling with mirth, delighted with her flowers, wild flowers which she had plaited into her fair hair, fastened to her neck, her bodice, and her bare slender golden arms. She seemed like a huge nosegay, exhaling a powerful perfume.
‘Ay, you are a beauty!’ growled the old man. ‘You smell of weeds enough to poison one—would any one think she was sixteen, that doll?’
Albine remained unabashed, however, and laughed still more heartily. Doctor Pascal, who was her great friend, let her kiss him.
‘So you are not frightened in the Paradou?’ he asked.
‘Frightened? What of?’ she said, her eyes wide open with astonishment. ‘The walls are too high, no one can get in. There’s only myself. It is my garden, all my very own. A fine big one, too. I haven’t found out where it ends yet.’
‘And the animals?’ interrupted the doctor.
‘The animals? Oh! they don’t hurt; they all know me well.’
‘But it is very dark under the trees?’
‘Course! there’s shade: if there were none, the sun would burn my face up. It is very pleasant in the shade among the leaves.’
She flitted about, filling the little garden with the rustling sweep of her skirts, and scattering round the pungent odour of wild flowers which clung to her. She had smiled at Abbé Mouret without trace of shyness, without heed of the astonished look with which he observed her. The priest had stepped aside. That fair-haired maid, with long oval face, glowing with life, seemed to him to be the weird mysterious offspring of the forest of which he had caught a glimpse in a sheet of sunlight.
‘I say, I have got some blackbird nestlings; would you like them?’ Albine asked the doctor.
‘No, thanks,’ he answered, laughing. ‘You should give them to the Curé’s sister; she is very fond of pets. Good day, Jeanbernat.’
Albine, however, had fastened on the priest.
‘You are the vicar of Les Artaud, aren’t you? You have a sister? I’ll go and see her. Only you must not speak to me about God. My uncle will not have it.’
‘You bother us, be off,’ exclaimed Jeanbernat, shrugging his shoulders. Then bounding away like a goat, dropping a shower of flowers behind her, she disappeared. The slam of a door was heard, and from behind the house came bursts of laughter, which died away in the distance like the scampering rush of some mad animal let loose among the grass.
‘You’ll see, she will end by sleeping in the Paradou,’ muttered the old man with indifference.
And as he saw his visitors off, he added: ‘If you should find me dead one of these fine days, doctor, just do me the favour of pitching me into the muck-pit there, behind my lettuces. Good evening, gentlemen.’
He let the wooden gate which closed the hedge fall to again, and the house assumed once more its aspect of happy peacefulness in the noonday sunlight, amidst the buzzing of the big flies that swarmed all up the ivy even to the roof tiles.
IX
The gig once more rolled along the road skirting the Paradou’s interminable wall. Abbé Mouret, still silent, scanned with upturned eyes the huge boughs which stretched over that wall, like the arms of giants hidden there. All sorts of sounds came from the park: rustling of wings, quivering of leaves, furtive bounds at which branches snapped, mighty sighs that bowed the young shoots—a vast breath of life sweeping over the crests of a nation of trees. At times, as he heard a birdlike note that seemed like a human laugh, the priest turned his head, as if he felt uneasy.
‘A queer girl!’ said his uncle as he eased the reins a little. ‘She was nine years old when she took up her quarters with that old heathen. Some brother of his had ruined himself, though in what I can’t remember. The little one was at school somewhere when her father killed himself. She was even quite a little lady, up to reading, embroidery, chattering, and strumming on the piano. And such a coquette too! I saw her arrive with open-worked stockings, embroidered skirts, frills, cuffs, a heap of finery. Ah, well! the finery didn’t last long!’
He laughed. A big stone nearly upset the gig.
‘It will be lucky if I don’t leave a wheel in this cursed road!’ he muttered. ‘Hold on, my boy.’
The wall still stretched beside them: the priest still listened.
‘As you may well imagine,’ continued the doctor, ‘the Paradou, what with its sun, its stones, and its thistles, would wreck a whole outfit every day. Three or four mouthfuls, that’s all it made of all the little one’s beautiful dresses. She used to come back naked. Now she dresses like a savage. To-day she was rather presentable; but sometimes she has scarcely anything on beyond her shoes and chemise. Did you hear her? The Paradou is hers. The very day after she came she took possession of it. She lives in it; jumps out of the window when Jeanbernat locks the door, bolts off in spite of all, goes nobody knows whither, buries herself in some invisible burrows known only to herself. She must have a fine time in that wilderness.’
‘Hark, uncle!’ interrupted Abbé Mouret. ‘Isn’t that some animal running behind the wall?’
Uncle Pascal listened.
‘No,’ he said after a minute’s silence, ‘it is the rattle of the trap on the stones. No, the child doesn’t play the piano now. I believe she has even forgotten how to read. Just picture to yourself a young lady gone back to a state of primevalness, turned out to play on a desert island. My word, if ever you get to know of a girl who needs proper bringing up, I advise you not to entrust her to Jeanbernat. He has a most primitive way of letting nature alone. When I ventured to speak to him about Albine he answered me that he must not prevent trees from growing as they pleased. He says he is for the normal development of temperaments.... All the same, they are very interesting, both of them. I never come this way without paying them a visit.’
The gig was now emerging from the hollowed road. At this point the wall of the Paradou turned and wound along the crest of the hills as far as one could see. As Abbé Mouret turned to take a last look at that grey-hued barrier, whose impenetrable austerity had at last begun to annoy him, a rustling of shaken boughs was heard and a clump of young birch trees seemed to bow in greeting from above the wall.
‘I knew some animal was running behind,’ said the priest.
But, although nobody could be seen, though nothing was visible in the air above save the birches rocking more and more violently, they heard a clear, laughing voice call out: ‘Good-bye, doctor! good-bye, Monsieur le Curé! I am kissing the tree, and the tree is sending you my kisses.’
‘Why! it is Albine,’ exclaimed Doctor Pascal. ‘She must have followed the trap at a run. Jumping over bushes is mere play to her, the little elf!’
And he in his turn shouted out:
‘Good-bye, my pet! How tall you must be to bow like that.’
The laughter grew louder, the birches bowed still lower, scattering their leaves around even on the hood of the gig.
‘I am as tall as the trees; all the leaves that fall are kisses,’ replied the voice now mellowed by distance, so musical, so merged into the rippling whispers of the park, that the young priest was thrilled.
The road grew better. On coming down the slope Les Artaud reappeared in the midst of the scorched plain. When the gig reached the turning to the village, Abbé Mouret would not let his uncle drive him back to the vicarage. He jumped down, saying:
‘No, thanks, I prefer to walk: it will do me good.’
‘Well, just as you like,’ at last answered the doctor. And with a clasp of the hand, he added: ‘Well, if you only had such parishioners as that old brute Jeanbernat, you wouldn’t often be disturbed. However, you yourself wanted to come. And mind you keep well. At the slightest ache, night or day, send for me. You know I attend all the family gratis.... There, good-bye, my boy.’
X
Abbé Mouret felt more at ease when he found himself again alone, walking along the dusty road. The stony fields brought him back to his dream of austerity, of an inner life spent in a desert. From the trees all along the sunken road disturbing moisture had fallen on his neck, which now the burning sun was drying. The sight of the lean almond trees, the scanty corn crops, the weak vines, on either side of the way, soothed him, delivered him from the perturbation into which the lusty atmosphere of the Paradou had thrown him. Amid the blinding glare that flowed from heaven over the bare land, Jeanbernat’s blasphemies no longer cast even a shadow. A thrill of pleasure ran through the priest as he raised his head and caught sight of the solitaire’s motionless bar-like silhouette and the pink patch of tiles on the church.
But, as he walked on, fresh anxiety beset the Abbé. La Teuse would give him a fine reception; for his luncheon must have been waiting nearly two hours for him. He pictured her terrible face, the flood of words with which she would greet him, the angry clatter of kitchen ware which he would hear the whole afternoon. When he had got through Les Artaud, his fear became so lively that he hesitated, full of trepidation, and wondered if it would not be better to go round and reach the parsonage by way of the church. But, while he deliberated, La Teuse herself appeared on the doorstep of the parsonage, her cap all awry, and her hands on her hips. With drooping head he had perforce to climb the slope under her storm-laden gaze, which he could feel weighing upon his shoulders.
‘I believe I am rather late, my good Teuse,’ he stammered, as he turned the path’s last bend.
La Teuse waited till he stood quite close before her. She then gave him a furious glance, and, without a word, turned and stalked before him into the dining-room, banging her big heels upon the floor-tiles and so rigid with ire that she hardly limped at all.
‘I have had so many things to do,’ began the priest, scared by this dumb reception. ‘I have been running about all the morning.’
But she cut him short with another look, so fixed, so full of anger, that he felt his legs give way under him. He sat down, and began to eat. She waited on him in the sharp, mechanical manner of an automaton, all but breaking the plates with the violence with which she set them down. The silence became so awful that, choking with emotion, he was unable to swallow his third mouthful.
‘My sister has had her luncheon?’ he asked. ‘Quite right of her. Luncheon should always be served whenever I am kept out.’
No answer came. La Teuse stood there waiting to remove his plate as soon as he should have emptied it. Thereupon, feeling that he could not possibly eat with those implacable eyes crushing him, he pushed his plate away. This angry gesture acted on La Teuse like a whip stroke, rousing her from her obstinate stiffness. She fairly jumped.
‘Ah! that’s how it is!’ she exclaimed. ‘There you are again, losing your temper! Very well, I am off; you can pay my fare, so that I may go back home. I have had enough of Les Artaud, and your church, and everything else!’
She took off her apron with trembling hands.
‘You must have seen that I didn’t wish to say anything to you. A nice life, indeed! Only mountebanks do such things, Monsieur le Curé! This is eleven o’clock, ain’t it! Aren’t you ashamed of sitting at table when it’s almost two o’clock? It’s not like a Christian, no, it is not like a Christian!’
And, taking her stand before him, she went on: ‘Well, where do you come from? whom have you seen? what business can have kept you? If only you were a child you would have the whip. It isn’t the place for a priest to be, on the roads in the blazing sun like a tramp without a roof to put over his head. A fine state you are in, with your shoes all white and your cassock smothered in dust! Who will brush your cassock for you? Who will buy you another one? Speak out, will you; tell me what you have been doing! My word! if everybody didn’t know you, they would end by thinking queer things about you. And shall I tell you? Why, I won’t say but what you may have been up to something wrong. When folks lunch at such hours they are capable of anything!’
Abbé Mouret let the storm blow over him. At the old servant’s wrathful words he experienced a kind of relief.
‘Come, my good Teuse,’ he said, ‘you will first put your apron on again.’
‘No, no,’ she cried, ‘it’s all over, I am going.’
But he got up and, laughing, tied her apron round her waist. She struggled against him and stuttered: ‘I tell you no! You are a wheedler. I can see through your game, I see you want to come it over me with your honeyed words. Where did you go? We’ll see afterwards.’
He gaily sat down to table again like a man who has gained a victory.
‘First, I must be allowed to eat. I am dying with hunger,’ said he.
‘No doubt,’ she murmured, her pity moved. ‘Is there any common sense in it? Would you like me to fry you a couple of eggs? It would not take long. Well, if you have enough. But everything is cold! And I had taken such pains with your aubergines! Nice they are now! They look like old shoe-leather. Luckily you haven’t got a tender tooth like poor Monsieur Caffin. Yes, you have some good points, I don’t deny it.’
Thus chattering, she waited on him with all a mother’s care. After he had finished she ran to the kitchen to see if the coffee was still warm. She frisked about and limped most outrageously in her delight at having made things up with him. As a rule Abbé Mouret fought shy of coffee, which always upset his nervous system; but on this occasion, to ratify the conclusion of peace, he took the cup she brought him. And as he lingered at table she sat down opposite him and repeated gently, like a woman tortured by curiosity:
‘Where have you been, Monsieur le Curé?’
‘Well,’ he answered with a smile, ‘I have seen the Brichets, I have spoken to Bambousse.’
Thereupon he had to relate to her what the Brichets had said, what Bambousse had decided, and how they looked, and where they were at work. When he repeated to her the answer of Rosalie’s father, ‘Of course!’ she exclaimed, ‘if the child should die her mishap would go for nothing.’ And clasping her hands with a look of envious admiration she added, ‘How you must have chattered, your reverence! More than half the day spent to obtain such a fine result! You took it easy coming home? It must have been very hot on the road?’
The Abbé, who by this time had risen, made no answer. He had been on the point of speaking about the Paradou, and asking for some information concerning it. But a fear of being flooded with eager questions, and a kind of vague unavowed shame, made him keep silence respecting his visit to Jeanbernat. He cut all further questions short by asking:
‘Where is my sister? I don’t hear her.’
‘Come along, sir,’ said La Teuse, beginning to laugh, and raising her finger to her lips.
They went into the next room, a country drawing-room, hung with faded wall-paper showing large grey flowers, and furnished with four armchairs and a sofa, covered with horse-hair. On the sofa now slept Desirée, stretched out at full length, with her head resting on her clenched hands. The pronounced curve of her bosom was raised somewhat by her upstretched arms, bare to the elbows. She was breathing somewhat heavily, her red lips parted, and thus showing her teeth.
‘Lord! isn’t she sleeping sound!’ whispered La Teuse. ‘She didn’t even hear you pitching into me just now. Well, she must be precious tired. Just fancy, she was cleaning up her yard till nearly noon. And when she had eaten something, she came and dropped down there like a shot. She has not stirred since.’
For a moment the priest gazed lovingly at her. ‘We must let her have as much rest as she wants,’ he said.
‘Of course. Isn’t it a pity she’s such an innocent? Just look at those big arms! Whenever I dress her I always think what a fine woman she would have made. Ay, she would have brought you some splendid nephews, sir. Don’t you think she is like that stone lady in Plassans corn-market?’
She spoke thus of a Cybele stretched upon sheaves of wheat, the work of one of Puget’s pupils, which was carved on the frontal of the market building. Without replying, however, Abbé Mouret gently pushed her out of the room, and begged her to make as little noise as possible. Till evening, therefore, perfect silence settled on the parsonage. La Teuse finished her washing in the shed. The priest, seated at the bottom of the little garden, his breviary fallen on his lap, remained absorbed in pious thoughts, while all around him rosy petals rained from the blossoming peach-trees.
XI
About six o’clock there came a sudden wakening. A noise of doors opening and closing, accompanied by bursts of laughter, shook the whole house. Desirée appeared, her hair all down and her arms still half bare.
‘Serge! Serge!’ she called.
And catching sight of her brother in the garden, she ran up to him and sat down for a minute on the ground at his feet, begging him to follow her:
‘Do come and see the animals! You haven’t seen the animals yet, have you? If you only knew how beautiful they are now!’
She had to beg very hard, for the yard rather scared him. But when he saw tears in Desirée’s eyes, he yielded. She threw herself on his neck in a sudden puppy-like burst of glee, laughing more than ever, without attempting to dry her cheeks.
‘Oh! how nice you are!’ she stammered, as she dragged him off. ‘You shall see the hens, the rabbits, the pigeons, and my ducks which have got fresh water, and my goat, whose room is as clean as mine now. I have three geese and two turkeys, you know. Come quick. You shall see all.’
Desirée was then twenty-two years old. Reared in the country by her nurse, a peasant woman of Saint-Eutrope, she had grown up anyhow. Her brain void of all serious thoughts, she had thriven on the fat soil and open air of the country, developing physically but never mentally, growing into a lovely animal—white, with rosy blood and firm skin. She was not unlike a high-bred donkey endowed with the power of laughter. Although she dabbled about from morning till night, her delicate hands and feet, the supple outlines of her hips, the bourgeois refinement of her maiden form remained unimpaired; so that she was in truth a creature apart—neither lady nor peasant—but a girl nourished by the soil, with the broad shoulders and narrow brow of a youthful goddess.
Doubtless it was by reason of her weak intellect that she was drawn towards animals. She was never happy save with them; she understood their language far better than that of mankind, and looked after them with motherly affection. Her reasoning powers were deficient, but in lieu thereof she had an instinct which put her on a footing of intelligence with them. At their very first cry of pain she knew what ailed them; she would choose dainties upon which they would pounce greedily. A single gesture from her quelled their squabbles. She seemed to know their good or their evil character at a glance; and related such long tales about the tiniest chick, with such an abundance and minuteness of detail, as to astound those to whom one chicken was exactly like any other. Her farmyard had thus become a country, as it were, over which she reigned; a country complex in its organisation, disturbed by rebellions, peopled by the most diverse creatures whose records were known to her alone. So accurate was her instinct that she detected the unfertile eggs in a sitting, and foretold the number of a litter of rabbits.
When, at sixteen, Desirée became a young woman, she retained all her wonted health; and rapidly developed, with round, free-swaying bust, broad hips like those of an antique statue, the full growth indeed of a vigorous animal. One might have thought that she had sprung from the rich soil of her poultry-yard, that she absorbed the sap with her sturdy legs, which were as firm as young trees. And nought disturbed her amidst all this plenitude. She found continuous satisfaction in being surrounded by birds and animals which ever increased and multiplied, their fruitfulness filling her with delight. Nothing could have been healthier. She innocently feasted on the odour and warmth of life, knowing no depraved curiosity, but retaining all the tranquillity of a beautiful animal, simply happy at seeing her little world thus multiply, feeling as if she thereby became a mother, the common natural mother of one and all.
Since she had been living at Les Artaud, she had spent her days in complete beatitude. At last she was satisfying the dream of her life, the only desire which had worried her amidst her weak-minded puerility. She had a poultry-yard, a nook all to herself, where she could breed animals to her heart’s content. And she almost lived there, building rabbit-hutches with her own hands, digging out a pond for the ducks, knocking in nails, fetching straw, allowing no one to assist her. All that La Teuse had to do was to wash her afterwards. The poultry-yard was situated behind the cemetery; and Desirée often had to jump the wall, and run hither and thither among the graves after some fowl whom curiosity had led astray. Right at the end was a shed giving accommodation to the fowls and the rabbits; to the right was a little stable for the goat. Moreover, all the animals lived together; the rabbits ran about with the fowls, the nanny-goat would take a footbath in the midst of the ducks; the geese, the turkeys, the guinea-fowls, and the pigeons all fraternised in the company of three cats. Whenever Desirée appeared at the wooden fence which prevented her charges from making their way into the church, a deafening uproar greeted her.
‘Eh! can’t you hear them?’ she said to her brother, as they reached the dining-room door.
But, when she had admitted him and closed the gate behind them, she was assailed so violently that she almost disappeared. The ducks and the geese, opening and shutting their beaks, tugged at her skirts; the greedy hens sprang up and pecked her hands; the rabbits squatted on her feet and then bounded up to her knees; whilst the three cats leapt upon her shoulders, and the goat bleated in its stable at being unable to reach her.
‘Leave me alone, do! all you creatures!’ she cried with a hearty sonorous laugh, feeling tickled by all the feathers, claws, and beaks and paws rubbing against her.
However, she did not attempt to free herself. As she often said, she would have let herself be devoured; it seemed so sweet to feel all this life cling to her and encompass her with the warmth of eider-down. At last only one cat persisted in remaining on her back.
‘It’s Moumou,’ she said. ‘His paws are like velvet.’ Then, calling her brother’s attention to the yard, she proudly added: ‘See, how clean it is!’
The yard had indeed been swept out, washed, and raked over. But the disturbed water and the forked-up litter exhaled so fetid and powerful an odour that Abbé Mouret half choked. The dung was heaped against the graveyard wall in a huge smoking mound.
‘What a pile, eh?’ continued Desirée, leading her brother into the pungent vapour, ‘I put it all there myself, nobody helped me. Go on, it isn’t dirty. It cleans. Look at my arms.’
As she spoke she held out her arms, which she had merely dipped into a pail of water—regal arms they were, superbly rounded, blooming like full white roses amidst the manure.
‘Yes, yes,’ gently said the priest, ‘you have worked hard. It’s very nice now.’
Then he turned towards the wicket, but she stopped him.
‘Do wait a bit. You shall see them all. You have no idea—’ And so saying, she dragged him to the rabbit house under the shed.
‘There are young ones in all the hutches,’ she said, clapping her hands in glee.
Then at great length she proceeded to explain to him all about the litters. He had to crouch down and come close to the wire netting, whilst she gave him minute details. The mother does, with big restless ears, eyed him askance, panting and motionless with fear. Then, in one hutch, he saw a hairy cavity wherein crawled a living heap, an indistinct dusky mass heaving like a single body. Close by some young ones, with enormous heads, ventured to the edge of the hole. A little farther were yet stronger ones, who looked like young rats, ferreting and leaping about with their raised rumps showing their white scuts. Others, white ones with pale ruby eyes, and black ones with jet eyes, galloped round their hutches with playful grace. Now a scare would make them bolt off swiftly, revealing at every leap their slender reddened paws. Next they would squat down all in a heap, so closely packed that their heads could no longer be seen.
‘It is you they are frightened at,’ Desirée kept on saying. ‘They know me well.’
She called them and drew some bread-crust from her pocket. The little rabbits then became more confident, and, with puckered noses, kept sidling up, and rearing against the netting one by one. She kept them like that for a minute to show her brother the rosy down upon their bellies, and then gave her crust to the boldest one. Upon this the whole of them flocked up, sliding forward and squeezing one another, but never quarreling. At one moment three little ones were all nibbling the same piece of crust, but others darted away, turning to the wall so as to eat in peace, while their mothers in the rear remained snuffing distrustfully and refused the crusts.
‘Oh! the greedy little things!’ exclaimed Desirée. ‘They would eat like that till to-morrow morning! At night, even, you can bear them crunching the leaves they have overlooked in the day-time.’
The priest had risen as if to depart, but she never wearied of smiling on her dear little ones.
‘You see the big one there, that’s all white, with black ears—Well! he dotes on poppies. He is very clever at picking them out from the other weeds. The other day he got the colic. So I took him and kept him warm in my pocket. Since then he has been quite frisky.’
She poked her fingers through the wire netting and stroked the rabbits’ backs.
‘Wouldn’t you say it was satin?’ she continued. ‘They are dressed like princes. And ain’t they coquettish! Look, there’s one who is always cleaning himself. He wears the fur off his paws.... If only you knew how funny they are! I say nothing, but I see all their little games. That grey one looking at us, for instance, used to hate a little doe, which I had to put somewhere else. There were terrible scenes between them. It would take too long to tell you all, but the last time he gave her a drubbing, when I came up in a rage, what do you think I saw? Why that rascal huddled up at the back there as if he was just at his last gasp. He wanted to make me believe that it was he who had to complain of her.’
Then Desirée paused to apostrophise the rabbit. ‘Yes, you may listen to me; you’re a rogue!’ And turning towards her brother, ‘He understands all I say,’ she added softly, with a wink.
But Abbé Mouret could stand it no longer. He was perturbed by the heat that emanated from the litters, the life that crawled under the hair plucked from the does’ bellies, exhaling powerful emanations. On the other hand, Desirée, as if slowly intoxicated, was growing brighter and pinker.
‘But there’s nothing to take you away!’ she cried; ‘you always seem anxious to go off. You must see my little chicks! They were born last night.’
She took some rice and threw a handful before her. The hen gravely drew near, clucking to the little band of chickens that followed her chirping and scampering as if in bewilderment. When they were fairly in the middle of the scattered rice the hen eagerly pecked at it, and threw down the grains she cracked, while her little ones hastily began to feed. All the charm of infancy was theirs. Half-naked as it were, with round heads, eyes sparkling like steel needles, beaks so queerly set, and down so quaintly ruffled up, they looked like penny toys. Desirée laughed with enjoyment at sight of them.
‘What little loves they are!’ she stammered.
She took up two of them, one in each hand, and smothered them with eager kisses. And then the priest had to inspect them all over, while she coolly said to him:
‘It isn’t easy to tell the cocks. But I never make a mistake. This one is a hen, and this one is a hen too.’
Then she set them on the ground again. Other hens were now coming up to eat the rice. A large ruddy cock with flaming plumage followed them, lifting his large feet with majestic caution.
‘Alexander is getting splendid,’ said the Abbé, to please his sister.
Alexander was the cock’s name. He looked up at the young girl with his fiery eye, his head turned round, his tail outspread, and then installed himself close by her skirts.
‘He is very fond of me,’ she said. ‘Only I can touch him. He is a good bird. There are fourteen hens, and never do I find a bad egg in the nests. Do I, Alexander?’
She stooped; the bird did not fly from her caress. A rush of blood seemed to set his comb aflame; flapping his wings, and stretching out his neck, he burst into a long crow which rang out like a blast from a brazen throat. Four times did he repeat his crow while all the cocks of Les Artaud answered in the distance. Desirée was greatly amused by her brother’s startled looks.
‘He deafens one, eh?’ she said. ‘He has a splendid voice. But he’s not vicious, I assure you, though the hens are—You remember the big speckled one, that used to lay yellow eggs? Well, the day before yesterday she hurt her foot. When the others saw the blood they went quite mad. They all followed her, pecking at her and drinking her blood, so that by the evening they had eaten up her foot. I found her with her head behind a stone, like an idiot, saying nothing, and letting herself be devoured.’
The remembrance of the fowls’ voracity made her laugh. She calmly related other cruelties of theirs: young chickens devoured, of which she had only found the necks and wings, and a litter of kittens eaten up in the stable in a few hours.
‘You might give them a human being,’ she continued, ‘they’d finish him. And aren’t they tough livers! They get on with a broken limb even. They may have wounds, big holes in their bodies, and still they’ll gobble their victuals. That’s what I like them for; their flesh grows again in two days; they are always as warm as if they had a store of sunshine under their feathers. When I want to give them a treat, I cut them up some raw meat. And worms too! Wait, you’ll see how they love them.’
She ran to the dungheap, and unhesitatingly picked up a worm she found there. The fowls darted at her hands; but to amuse herself with the sight of their greediness she held the worm high above them. At last she opened her fingers, and forthwith the fowls hustled one another and pounced upon the worm. One of them fled with it in her beak, pursued by the others; it was thus taken, snatched away, and retaken many times until one hen, with a mighty gulp, swallowed it altogether. At that they all stopped short with heads thrown back, and eyes on the alert for another worm. Desirée called them by their names, and talked pettingly to them; while Abbé Mouret retreated a few steps from this display of voracious life.
‘No, I am not at all comfortable,’ he said to his sister, when she tried to make him feel the weight of a fowl she was fattening. ‘It always makes me uneasy to touch live animals.’
He tried to smile, but Desirée taxed him with cowardice.
‘Ah well, what about my ducks, and geese, and turkeys?’ said she. ‘What would you do if you had all those to look after? Ducks are dirty, if you like. Do you hear them shaking their bills in the water? And when they dive, you can only see their tails sticking straight up like ninepins. Geese and turkeys, too, are not easy to manage. Isn’t it fun to see them walking along with their long necks, some quite white and others quite black? They look like ladies and gentlemen. And I wouldn’t advise you to trust your finger to them. They would swallow it at a gulp. But my fingers, they only kiss—see!’
Her words were cut short by a joyous bleat from the goat, which had at last forced the door of the stable open. Two bounds and the animal was close to her, bending its forelegs, and affectionately rubbing its horns against her. To the priest, with its pointed beard and obliquely set eyes, it seemed to wear a diabolical grin. But Desirée caught it round the neck, kissed its head, played and ran with it, and talked about how she liked to drink its milk. She often did so, she said, when she was thirsty in the stable.
‘See, it has plenty of milk,’ she added, pointing to the animal’s udder.
The priest lowered his eyes. He could remember having once seen in the cloister of Saint-Saturnin at Plassans a horrible stone gargoyle, representing a goat and a monk; and ever since he had always looked on goats as dissolute creatures of hell. His sister had only been allowed to get one after weeks of begging. For his part, whenever he came to the yard, he shunned all contact with the animal’s long silky coat, and carefully guarded his cassock from the touch of its horns.
‘All right, I’ll let you go now,’ said Desirée, becoming aware of his growing discomfort. ‘But you must just let me show you something else first. Promise not to scold me, won’t you? I have not said anything to you about it, because you wouldn’t have allowed it.... But if you only knew how pleased I am!’
As she spoke she put on an entreating expression, clasped her hands, and laid her head upon her brother’s shoulder.
‘Another piece of folly, no doubt,’ he murmured, unable to refrain from smiling.
‘You won’t mind, will you?’ she continued, her eyes glistening with delight. ‘You won’t be angry?—He is so pretty!’
Thereupon she ran to open the low door under the shed, and forthwith a little pig bounded into the middle of the yard.
‘Oh! isn’t he a cherub?’ she exclaimed with a look of profound rapture as she saw him leap out.
The little pig was indeed charming, quite pink, his snout washed clean by the greasy slops placed before him, though incessant routing in his trough had left a ring of dirt about his eyes. He trotted about, hustled the fowls, rushing to gobble up whatever was thrown them, and upsetting the little yard with his sudden turns and twists. His ears flapped over his eyes, his snout went snorting over the ground, and with his slender feet he resembled a toy animal on wheels. From behind, his tail looked like a bit of string that served to hang him up by.
‘I won’t have this beast here!’ exclaimed the priest, terribly put out.
‘Oh, Serge, dear old Serge,’ begged Desirée again, ‘don’t be so unkind. See, what a harmless little thing he is! I’ll wash him, I’ll keep him very clean. La Teuse went and had him given her for me. We can’t send him back now. See, he is looking at you; he wants to smell you. Don’t be afraid, he won’t eat you.’
But she broke off, seized with irresistible laughter. The little pig had blundered in a dazed fashion between the goat’s legs, and tripped her up. And he was now madly careering round, squeaking, rolling, scaring all the denizens of the poultry-yard. To quiet him Desirée had to get him an earthen pan full of dish-water. In this he wallowed up to his ears, splashing and grunting, while quick quivers of delight coursed over his rosy skin. And now his uncurled tail hung limply down.
The stirring of this foul water put a crowning touch to Abbé Mouret’s disgust. Ever since he had been there, he had choked more and more; his hands and chest and face were afire, and he felt quite giddy. The odour of the fowls and rabbits, the goat, and the pig, all mingled in one pestilential stench. The atmosphere, laden with the ferments of life, was too heavy for his maiden shoulders. And it seemed to him that Desirée had grown taller, expanding at the hips, waving huge arms, sweeping the ground with her skirts, and stirring up all that powerful odour which overpowered him. He had only just time to open the wicket. His feet clung to the stone flags still dank with manure, in such wise that it seemed as if he were held there by some clasp of the soil. And suddenly, despite himself, there came back to him a memory of the Paradou, with its huge trees, its black shadows, its penetrating perfumes.
‘There, you are quite red now,’ Desirée said to him as she joined him outside the wicket. ‘Aren’t you pleased to have seen everything? Do you hear the noise they are making?’
On seeing her depart, the birds and animals had thrown themselves against the trellis work emitting piteous cries. The little pig, especially, gave vent to prolonged whines that suggested the sharpening of a saw. Desirée, however, curtsied to them and kissed her finger-tips to them, laughing at seeing them all huddled together there, like so many lovers of hers. Then, hugging her brother, as she accompanied him to the garden, she whispered into his ear with a blush: ‘I should so like a cow.’
He looked at her, with a ready gesture of disapproval.
‘No, no, not now,’ she hurriedly went on. ‘We’ll talk about it again later on—— But there would be room in the stable. A lovely white cow with red spots. You’d soon see what nice milk we should have. A goat becomes too little in the end. And when the cow has a calf!’
At the mere thought of this she skipped and clapped her hands with glee; and to the priest she seemed to have brought the poultry-yard away with her in her skirts. So he left her at the end of the garden, sitting in the sunlight on the ground before a hive, whence the bees buzzed like golden berries round her neck, along her bare arms and in her hair, without thought of stinging her.