It was the reply which Honore both desired and feared.
“So now you’re reminding me that I’m living in your house! All right then, I’ll clear out next week. You can do what you like with your blasted house! I’m sick to death of being told that I’m living at your expense!”
He was shouting at the top of his voice. Ferdinand struggled in vain to make his own shrill piping heard.
“I’d sooner sleep in a ditch than spend another week here! I’ll go on Wednesday, and I’ll go right away from Claquebue. You can come and live here if you like, and you can deal with Zephe by yourself. I don’t belong here any more.”
Seeing his brother aghast at these last words, Honore added with a savage grin:
“I wouldn’t buy your letter back from Zephe if he offered to let me have it for fiftv centimes!”
Ferdinand was beside himself with agitation and alarm. He moved a few jerky paces as though hypnotised, raised the tail of a cow in an unconscious professional gesture, and stared at his brother with expressionless eyes. Honore, still boiling with rage, was on the verge of going back to the house to tell everyone of their forthcoming departure,
which would have obliged him to carry out the threat. But the sight of Ferdinand’s distress made him pause. Shrugging his shoulders, he took a step towards him. Ferdinand stood with the cow’s tail in his hand, smiling vacantly at him. Honore was suddenly touched and remorseful.
“Ferdinand. .”
Ferdinand did not move. He murmured a few incoherent words, of which Honore caught, “—the letter. .” “Ferdinand, where’s the sense in quarrelling? Leave that cow alone and let’s talk quietly. Your letter’s with Maloret and we shall have to try and get it back. Why not sit down? I don’t like to see you standing there like that, you look like an idiot. To start with, I should like to know exactly what you wrote to me, in full detail. Try to remember.”
Ferdinand could recall almost word for word every letter he had written during the past year and every speech he had made. Although at first he stumbled a little in his perturbation, he was not slow to gather strength, embellishing his recital with inflections of voice and movements of his hand—“My dear Honore, — The black horse was taken with colic at the beginning of the week. . ” “Yes,” said Honore when he had finished, “you’ve landed us nicely in the soup. You certainly didn’t leave out much.” “All the same, what I wrote was perfectly right.” Honore did not even trouble to answer. He sat down on the milking-stool and pictured Zephe Maloret’s pleasure as he read and re-read the letter. He had no doubt that it had been intense, and for him this was the greatest humiliation of all, compared with which the thought that the whole village would know the letter’s contents was as nothing. Zephe was now assured that the words he had spoken to that Bavarian sergeant had borne fruit, and no doubt in the form he had hoped for at the time. The more Honore thought about it, the less importance did he attach to the business of recovering the letter. What mattered far more was to exact such vengeance as would cause Maloret never to be able to recollect that incident without wincing.
Ferdinand held his breath, waiting for the words of wisdom. Seeing his brother blink both eyes and spit on the toe of his sabot, he concluded that something was taking shape in his mind, and in order not to disturb him moved away on tiptoe to proceed with his Sunday inspection of the animals.
“Leave my cows alone,” said Honore without looking up. “You aren’t going to do any good by prodding them about.”
Honore did not normally hesitate to give his brother the rough edge of his tongue; but he had never before ventured, and in such blunt terms, to assail the time-honoured practice of the consultation. Ferdinand perceived instantly that a change had come about in their relations. The occupant of his house, whom he had unconsciously looked upon more or less as his bailiff, had abruptly become the head of the family, the master of the Haudouins, whom in their present pass he was happy to obey.
“But if it isn’t going to cost you anything. he murmured timidly.
“Leave them alone, I tell you.”
Ferdinand meekly desisted.
“But let me just warn you,” he said despite himself, “that Fidele’s in season.”
“Well, if you’re interested.
Ferdinand detested nothing more than the coarse jest evoking specific images which might haunt him for days. He blushed, glanced at the cow, Fidele, could not prevent himself from gauging in his mind’s eye certain possibilities, and was revolted by his brother’s ribaldry.
“I really don’t understand how a man your age can talk that sort of filth! I don’t understand it!”
Honore had already forgotten what he had said. “What filth?” he asked.
“Why, what you just said.”
“I said something filthy?”
“ ‘If you’re interested’.
“How do you mean, if I’m interested?”
“It’s what you just said, ‘If you’re interested’.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Or rather, ‘If Vm interested’.
Ferdinand was growing agitated. Honore gazed at him anxiously, afraid that emotional disturbance had unsettled his mind.
“You should have something to eat,” he said. “Adelaide will make you some coffee to fill in the gap till dinner.” Ferdinand did not reply. He was filled with bitterness. Not merely had his morals been made the subject of a licentious jest, but he had been made to look a fool into the bargain. And this, as he noted not for the first time, is the way innocence and modesty are customarily rewarded. .
When the brothers left the cowshed it might have been observed that Ferdinand was of a yellow-greenish hue, and that he kept his posterior tightly tucked within the shelter of his jacket. Honore, on the other hand, appeared to be in high spirits. His eye was bright, and his body filled his clothes. He was heard to say:
“And for God’s sake don’t try to do anything more. You’ve done enough already. I absolutely forbid you to go anywhere near the man.”
Of the numerous different ways of making love practised in Claquebue, not all were approved of by the cure. I have no need to describe these in detail. They did not constitute a fund of common knowledge, since there was scarcely anyone in the village who knew even a quarter of them. They were household recipes, heirlooms conveyed from one family to another by marriage, childhood recollections or, more rarely, confidences between friends. It might appear at first sight that in a village comprising a few hundred souls these exchanges would cause the knowledge to spread until it became common property, but such was not the case. Personal preferences, the especial inhibitions of a wife or the authority of a husband, variously limited the horizon of each separate household, establishing habit and usage and driving into forgetfulness not only more recent acquisitions but sometimes even the traditions on which a family had lived for a hundred years. Young married couples were generally conservative, the husband insisting upon his own conventions. Certain families, admittedly, being of a more curious disposition, were attracted by novelty and variety. The Berthiers, for example, practised no fewer than five different methods. But they were exceptional, and there was no respectable, hard-working family which went beyond three. The Haudouins of Claquebue confined themselves almost invariably within the tradition handed down to them by Jules Haudouin, and even Alexis, the most enterprising of Haudouin’s sons, added to it nothing but refine-
ments of detail. Alexis from his childhood displayed the liveliest curiosity regarding the arts of love, reflecting upon all the possibilities suggested to him by his knowledge of the human anatomy, and showing himself to be inventive and remarkably uninhibited in his experiments with girls of his own age. But at the age of eighteen he put aside the knowledge he had acquired in preparation for his entry into a world where refinements and embellishments were merely so much useless lumber. The same thing happened to his brothers, as it had done to his father and as it did to the majority of the men of Claque-bue: having reached the stage of ripened adolescence, they abandoned their youthful, turbulent, untrammelled ways of love and, calling themselves severely to order, set about the serious business of choosing a wife. They did so with regret, like invalids on a diet who dream over their lightly-boiled eggs of the brave days of beef and dumplings; but who learn to endure it none the less, because the great thing is to stay alive in order to go on earning money. When a man is obliged with aching and sweat to scratch his living out of the soil he cannot worry his head with all the varieties of amorous procedure, or even half a dozen of them: he sticks to one, and rarely gives it a thought. The men of Claquebue forgot not only the gleanings of their tender years: they also forgot that the delights of love had a large place in their children’s play, or they pretended to do so.