Alexis, with his head resting on his hands, was pretending to be half-asleep — against all likelihood, because the two youngest were pulling Blackie’s ears and a great hubbub was coming from under the table. Vocal explosions were followed by angry murmurs, and then Clotilde announced in a small, clear voice:
“Mummy, Gustave’s trying to poke my eye out with Blackie’s tail.”
“No, I’m not! Anyway, she said I was a fat donkey.” “I didn’t!”
“You did!”
“Well, only after you tried to poke my eye out.”
“As if anyone could poke your eye out with Blackie’s tail!”
“Well, you tried!”
“I didn’t!”
Adelaide threatened absently to slap them both and went on cutting bread for the soup. She was thinking with some disquiet of the interview her husband had had with his brother two hours earlier. Never had she known Ferdinand to be so put out. After nodding to her without troubling to come into the house, he had gone off in the gig lashing the bay horse furiously.
Honore came in as it was growing dark. He was preoccupied and said as he sat down at the end of the table: “Let me have my food quickly. I want to go round to Messelons to see how Philibert’s getting on.”
“Juliette went this afternoon,” said Adelaide. “What’s more, she hasn’t come back yet, your darling Juliette, although it’s half-past eight.”
“Why ‘my darling Juliette’?”
“Because she knows her father never scolds her for anything, and she takes advantage of it. Why don’t you try and find out what she’s doing?”
“Perhaps she’s gone into the church to say a few pravers,” said Honore chuckling.
“It’s all very well to laugh. You think everything’s all right because her grandad left her a bit of money. But the day she finds herself in trouble it’ll take more than a dowry to get her the right sort of husband.”
Honore wagged his head, finding it hard that he should be so constantly assailed with tales lacking all substance. He had no reason at all to doubt Juliette’s virtue: not that she was spared temptation — a pretty girl like her! — but she had her pride. He had noticed, moreover, that young men are very much more likely to take liberties with penniless girls. Adelaide lit the lamp and put the bowl of soup on the table.
Honore was about to serve himself when a scream arose between his legs, so harrowing that even Alexis looked up in consternation. Adelaide cried out that the child must have swallowed an open safety-pin. Honore thrust back his stool and plunged his head under the table. There was another scream even more heartrending than the first, and Clotilde emerged into the light of the lamp.
“Mummy,” she said in a calm voice, “Gustave was pulling the hairs on my legs.”
Gustave turned red with indignation.
“It isn’t true! She hasn’t got any hairs on her legs, any more than I have!”
Adelaide picked up her daughter to inspect her. Clotilde stuck to it that she had hairs on her legs, although it was apparent to everyone that they were perfectly smooth. Undismayed, she maintained that Gustave must have pulled them all out. Her mother then slapped her to teach her not to tell lies. Clotilde laughed aloud at the slap, but then pursed her lips while her face took on an expression of cold rage. Gustave gave vent to noisy demonstrations of triumph which nearly got him into trouble as well. His father, furious after the fright Clotilde had given him, included both children in a thunderous denunciation:
“If you two brats don’t behave you’ll both get something to yell about! Sit down at the table at once, and don’t let me hear another sound from either of you.” He glared at them while they obeyed his orders, and grumbled as he filled his plate: “Hair on their legs! The conceit of it! Not yet ten, and showing off like their Uncle Ferdinand!”
When he was in a bad humour Honore was much given to discovering points of likeness between his children and their uncle, as though nothing worse in life could happen to him than to have sons resembling his brother. In the end he always took comfort, reflecting that it could not possibly be true and that he had done nothing to deserve so lamentable a punishment.
That evening, after his talk with Ferdinand, such comparisons were inevitable. Honore passed his sons under review. Ernest, the eldest, had a sharp profile not really like that of Ferdinand but not wholly dissimilar. And a thin, high, eunuch’s voice, God help us, which really was like his uncle’s!
And then Alexis. Being able to examine him in the flesh, Honore did so, and was surprised to find him huddled on his chair, shoulders rounded and head bent over his plate.
“What’s the matter with you? You aren’t generally as quiet as this.”
“That’s true,” said Adelaide. “What’s wrong with him this evening?. . Aren’t you feeling well? You look very flushed.”
Suddenly perturbed, she leaned across the table to see him better. Alexis crouched lower still, but he could not hide his shirt-collar from his mother’s searching gaze.
“Stand up! Come round here and take off your waistcoat.”
Alexis got up slowly with a beseeching glance at his father, who was not untouched by his evident distress. Gustave and Clotilde watched with eyes sparkling in the wicked expectation of wrath to come. Nor were they disappointed: his shirt was torn from the neck to the waist, and nearly half one of his trouser-legs was missing. Adelaide stalked round the miscreant with short paces, minutely scrutinising him with eyes that missed nothing. There was a dreadful silence. Alexis had turned pale.
“You know what I promised you last time,” said Adelaide. “To-morrow you’ll wear those trousers to Mass.”
“Mother, you might let me explain-”
“You’ll go to Mass in those trousers. I shall be just as ashamed as you, but we can’t help that.”
“Come, come,” said Honore. “Let him say whatever he has to say.”
The saving words gave Alexis some reassurance.
“It wasn’t my fault. We were just playing quietly down by the Trois-Vernes when a boy came along and-”
“What boy?” asked Adelaide.
Alexis did not want to speak the name. Parental justice nearly always gave rise to absurd complications. He tried to get out of it with a burst of eloquence.
“A great silly lout of fourteen who always comes and interferes with us when we’re looking after the cows. We weren’t doing him any harm. We were just playing, and-”
“Who was it?”
“Well. . well, it was Tintin Maloret.”
The name caused Honore to sit upright on his chair. He glared angrily at his son, a nincompoop who let his shirt be torn by a Maloret! So this one, too, took after his uncle!
“Do you mean to say you didn’t even knock his teeth down his throat?”
“Give me a chance! He took me by surprise when I was bending down, but I let him have it back when I got up again. I know he tore my clothes, but you should have seen what he was like! He went off limping with both legs!”
Honore’s face lightened in a half-smile.
“Limping, was he? Well, you were quite right to defend yourself. That crowd, you’ve got to watch out for them, they’re all alike.”
Adelaide remarked that the damage done to Tintin Maloret could not make good the damage to her son’s clothes. She wanted justice to be all-encompassing, but seeing the danger Alexis sought to forestall it by feeding his father’s wrath.
“Whenever there’s any trouble it’s practically certain to be Tintin’s fault. Only the day before yesterday he dragged Isabel Dur behind the Declos’s hedge and pulled her skirts up!”