“Well, that’s fine, they’ve got a winnowing-machine. So they won’t die of winnowing, but all the same they’ll die of something else. Us, we leave half the harvest standing because we’ve got to thresh out corn right away. Well, and so what? We’re hanging our tongues out in the barn while the Malorets are hanging theirs out in the sun, getting in the rest of the harvest. There’s only one thing to worry about, and that is if our corn gets rained on. Otherwise what odds does it make whether you’ve got a winnowing-machine or not? It’s just work all day, whatever happens. You work to earn your living, and you work for the sake of work, because it’s the only thing you know how to do. I’m not complaining. I like work and I’ve got plenty ahead of me. Let’s have the rest of the bottle. It’s hot.”
Adelaide refilled the glasses, and said after a moment of silence:
“I like work too, but all the same there are things you get angry about when you know you’ve kept yourself decent and nothing on your conscience.”
Honore clinked his glass in jest against Juliette’s, emptied it and said with a wag of his head:
“Well, when it comes to consciences. . well, I suppose so. I’m not saying, mind you, that the Malorets aren’t muck, and they’ll be hearing from me before long. What’s more, they aren’t going to enjoy it as much as they did Ferdinand’s letter. Those swine-”
Juliette lifted her head from his shoulder and said sharply:
“Why do you call them swine? It’s an easy thing to say!”
Honore looked at her, taken aback and at once perturbed. She stood up and tightened the string round her waist as though she were making ready for battle. Angered by this sudden rebellion, Adelaide said:
“In my young days if a girl had taken that tone of voice to her father she’d have been on the way to getting her ears boxed!”
“You don’t have to insult people just because a letter has been lost,” said Juliette. “And even if Zephe did take the letter, that’s no reason why you should be down on the whole family.”
“They’re all exactly the same,” said Adelaide. “You find you’ve got to deal with first one and then another.”
At this Honore jumped to his feet and, standing over his daughter, said violently:
“No, my God, not first one and then another! The whole lot of ’em, the whole bunch of Malorets together! D’you understand?”
Juliette changed countenance and stammered:
“Yes, I understand, but. . but you don’t know, you can’t know-”
Honore saw that she had turned pale and that her lips were trembling.
“Come on,” he said and picked up his flail, his own lips trembling a little.
Adelaide took Juliette’s hand and tried to lead her out of the barn.
“There’s still work to be done,” said Juliette, jerking her hand awav. “Leave me alone.”
Site took her flail and started again, and Adelaide departed. The threshing proceeded as before, with the same steady and monotonous rhythm. But the alternate beat of the flails on the threshing-floor could not fill the troubled silence that now separated father and daughter. They glanced sidelong at one another, not meeting each other’s eyes, angry and distressed. Now and then Honore would utter a grunt to keep the pace going, and Juliette would echo it, bringing down her flail. But presently it seemed to him that her voice had grown weaker, so that her grunt was like the whimper of a child. He let go his flail and cried:
“Juliette!”
She went on beating.
“Juliette. .” he said gently.
She looked up at him with eyes filled with tears.
“I just wanted to say — the Malorets-”
He drew her to him, pressing her weeping face to his chest.
“Don’t say anything.”
“I just wanted to say. .”
He clasped her more tightly, feeling her hot cheek against his breast. Juliette tried for a moment more to struggle free, but then yielded, her body shaken with sobs. He picked her up in his arms, as he often did in play, and carried her to the pile of sheaves, where she lay face down with her hands over her eyes. Honore picked up his flail again, and setting his teeth in wretchedness worked single-handed until midday.
In Honore’s household love was like the wine from a family vineyard: each one drank from his separate glass, but it engendered an especial intoxication that one brother could recognize in another, the father in the son, pervading the air they breathed like a voiceless song. There were mornings when the parents made ready for the day’s work with slumberous, happy faces and the children at their meal saw the joy in their mother’s heart. “So all went well last night!” They did not say it or even dare to think it, but they knew it and were glad. On those mornings laughter came easily. Or perhaps it was one of the boys who came home of an evening and took his place at table, silent and starry-eyed. No questions would be asked, but the others would glance at him covertly to share a little in the pleasure sleeping in his tired flesh. Honore would wink at his wife, but only when he was sure the boy was not looking, not wishing to embarrass this bringer of warmth into the house. And Adelaide would shrug her shoulders and say nothing, as though she were cross at seeing her son still flushed and his eyelids heavy with still-warm delight. To think how little he had once been, the great lump, and now look at him, chasing after the girls, and what with, I ask you! She would shrug her shoulders and move her saucepans gently so as to cause no disturbance, while the blood beat a little faster at her pulses, in part because her husband had winked at her: those two, father and son, one as bad as the other! Leaning over her cooking-stove she would laugh silently at the thought of that wink; and when the meal was ended the two smallest, seeing their mother languid and soft-eyed, would come and lay their heads in her lap and so fall asleep, and she would not dare to move and her tenderness would cast a spell upon all the house. .
But no such community of happiness existed in the home of Ferdinand in Saint-Margelon. Each went his separate and private way in search of love, and of them all only the father concerned himself w'ith the secrets of the others, and only to persecute them. His restless scrutiny, directed at his wife no less than at the children, w’as never for an instant relaxed. “You were over ten minutes in the lavatory,” he would say, with his watch in his hand. But despite his suspicions this remained the safest place: none of them went there without experiencing, mingled with their shame, a sense of release: sheltered from that probing eye they wrere free to pursue their untrammelled thoughts, their private dreams and pleasures. And these interludes of escape and solitude, filled with the drab images conjured up in apprehensive minds, came to bear a dismal resemblance to one another, as though their form and frequency, their very substance, were imposed upon them by a sort of family discipline.
They made use in their fantasies of such materials as their daily life afforded: for example, of the neighbours. There lived in the house opposite a policeman and his wife. He was a man who stood well over six feet, with shoulders wide enough to fill a doorwray. His wife had a bosom which prevented her seeing the ground, a most noble billowing, roundly conducive to imaginative flights. On Sunday mornings Frederic and Antoine would get up early and wait separately in ambush behind their respective window-curtains to see her, bare-armed and in a rose-pink corset, thrust open the shutters of her bedroom. Her arms were huge and faintly mottled. She would pause for a moment gazing dowm into the street, leaning with her hands on the window-ledge, the ample flesh constricted in deep folds at her armpits. But what excited the two boys was the pink corset. Nothing was to be seen of what was inside the corset, because its massive, out-thrust contents were covered by a decorously cut chemise: but one could imagine! During a long period Frederic and Antoine separately observed this Sunday-morning manifestation, each unaware that the other was doing the same. They might have continued in ignorance had not Ferdinand, entering Antoine’s room on tip-toe one morning, caught him at the window and seen what he was looking at. Prompted by the sixth sense which he had in these matters, he had rushed at once into Frederic’s room and found him similarly employed. Flinging wide the window he had leaned out and called in a ringing voice: