“God Almighty! If you’d stop shouting perhaps I’d be able to find out what happened when she went to their house!”
Adelaide told the tale, and with enlargements, overlooking nothing and dwelling upon the details. Indeed, so warm did she grow in the telling that she would have carried the tale further than it really went, had not Juliette intervened.
“No, Mother. . Because that’s when Deodat arrived.” “Yes, but only by accident!”
“Never mind,” cut in Honore. “He arrived at the right moment, and that’s what counts. Mark you, I’m not saying that to excuse the Malorets. We shall see what we shall see.”
“And what shall we see? All you do is talk!”
“Yes, what are you going to do about it?”
“That’s for me to decide. I shall do what I think-”
“I know! In a month of Sundays!”
“When the chickens have grown teeth!”
“And meanwhile they’ve always got that much satisfaction, that Noel tore her petticoat. I expect he’d have torn her drawers too, in another minute, if Deodat-”
“And it was a brand-new petticoat!”
“The one her Aunt Helene gave her.”
“And I’m sure I must have bruises on my thighs!”
“The way those two brutes grabbed hold of her-”
“Well, only Noel, but Zephe was egging him on. .
“— by the legs and anywhere else he fancied — and what else did he do, darling?”
“I don’t want to say any more.”
“You can tell us.”
“There are things one doesn’t like talking about.”
“Never mind what you like!”
“I’m not going to tell you any more!”
“Well, at least you can see what they did to her!”
“It wasn’t any use my struggling-”
“Your own daughter!”
“— because even if Zephe didn’t actually-”
“Your own daughter — and you don’t care in the least!” “— not to mention that Noel hurt me!”
“It’s a waste of time telling your father that, my dear— he’ll only laugh!”
“Your father’s such a nice man, you see — so kind to other people!”
“— and Noel… If Deodat hadn’t arrived. . Well, perhaps he didn’t really arrive, after all!”
“You’re only making your father laugh!”
“He could easily have been a bit slower on his round.” “While Noel was doing just what he liked with you!” “Perhaps Deodat hadn’t really got a letter for them at all!”
“And I shouldn’t wonder if Zephe wasn’t really there too, helping, only you haven’t liked to say so. And AnaTs looking on!”
“Yes, and Marguerite and Tintin, as well!”
“It’s a great pity your father couldn’t have joined in the fun!”
“After all, there’s no reason why Deodat should have gone there, if he hadn’t got a letter for them.
“And so there you were, poor child, at the mercy of the whole lot of them!”
“Five of them!”
“And they could do just what they liked with you, and that’s how our daughters get treated!”
“Children!” cried Adelaide, her voice now raised to the highest pitch. “Now look what you’ve done! The girl’s going to have a child by the Malorets!”
“If only,” said Honore patiently, “someone would tell me what really did happen!”
“Good heavens, what more do you want? Don’t you hear me telling you that your daughter’s in the family way?”
Honore gazed at his two women and read in his daughter’s eyes that the postman really and truly had arrived at the right moment. But then he went out of the bam into the yard, and thinking it all over under the hot sun he concluded that after all he might very easily not have arrived. His intervention had, as it appeared, been so miraculously timed that the whole affair had about it an air of unreality: which made it not at all difficult for him to adopt the supposition, for the time being, that his daughter had been got w'ith child by the Maloret family. He w'ent back into the barn and said:
“All right then, supposing Juliette’s in the family way— all the same, the Malorets were only plotting against us the way I wTas plotting against them. You can’t say I’m any better. Well, for instance, suppose she hadn’t told me any-
thing — not said a word — what do you think would have happened then?”
“Even in that case you surely wouldn’t have done what Marguerite wanted?”
“I don’t think so. But still, it was no way to behave, to sit there waiting for her behind the shutters. It was you who put that idea into my head, and it was a woman’s idea. I feel ashamed of it now.”
He went through the motions of spitting into Adelaide’s wash-tub by way of indicating that he renounced his wife’s methods.
“You’re being very noble,” said Juliette. “But I might be in the family way, and the Malorets have got that letter.”
“Yes, that’s very true,” said Honore. “Yes, of course— the letter. .”
And he surreptitiously felt the envelope in his pocket as he spoke.
Adelaide left the barn abruptly, and drying her hands on her apron went into the dining-room. At the sound of the clock’s ticking her sudden suspicion took clearer shape. She picked up the cover. .
“So you wound the clock?” she said to Honore when he came back.
“I? No, I didn’t.”
“Well, someone has. Was it Marguerite?”
“Well, I–I suppose it might have been. I have an idea she was looking at the clock when I left the room. Why do you ask?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
Juliette had already left the barn. She, too, made straight for the figures of Agriculture and Industry. .
Honore, who was meditating bold and summary vengeance, needed all the anger of his women to support him. Later, while he busied himself in the yard, it gave him pleasure to hear their voices strident with fury and malice as they exclaimed to one another.
“They’ve certainly got that letter!”
“And they’ll keep it — you’ll see!”
“They’ll make us swallow every kind of insult!”
“Zephe’s only waiting to be made mayor, and then he’ll spread it all over the district!”
“The shame of it! People will treat us as though we were worse than Marguerite!”
“And simply because of that letter!”. .
Until in the end Honore himself was clenching his fists, while his eyes blazed with fury.
“They’re going to give me back that letter! By God, I’ll see that they do!”
The posthumous renown of Murdoire has led to my appearing in art exhibitions all over Europe. I have thus been able to see for myself how the people in the great cities make love and make ready for love, and I have for them nothing but pity. Whether it preys upon their minds, upon the nobler impulses of their hearts, or, as is most often the case, upon the appropriate regions of their bodies, love to them is no more than a gnat-swarm of desires, a succession of torments, a pursuit without end. They are consumed with petty lusts for which they seek solace wherever they go, in the street, in the folds of a skirt, in their dwellings, at the theatre, in the workshop and office, in books, in ink-pots. The ardent lovers and the virtuous husbands and wives imagine themselves to be faithful to a grand passion, stormy or tranquil as the case may be, for an object which changes in aspect, or which simply changes, an incalculable number of times a day. A man will swear that he is in love with a woman, that he knows none more alluring, very much as he might say, “It is at So-and-So’s Restaurant that one dines best and most inexpensively.” He sets out for So-and-So’s fully intending to get there in good time. But should he take the wrong turning and chance upon some other establishment, seeming more attractive, he will very likely not get there at all. And if he does dine at So-and-So’s it will be with a secret regret in his heart for the place that was dearer, the place that was more crowded, the unknown. In the cities there is no true concupiscence, merely a diffused hankering after sexual love, a restless resolve to gratify each least desire. For three weeks, while I took part in an exhibition of Murdoire’s works, I hung opposite a well-known canvas entitled, “The Lonely Rider.” It depicted a man passing between two rows of women of all descriptions, beautiful and plain, young and old, fat and thin. He was staring straight in front of him, seeing nothing, his face tense with twinges of suffering and longing and regret, but with his nose still sniffing the air, his hands still ready to grasp. In his sombre eyes, witless and despairing, Murdoire had depicted a tiny gleam like a plaintive cry, desiring but without hope: the cry of the Wandering Jew doomed to squander through all eternity the small change of life. In the towns — I have seen it — each man walks between two rows of women, husbands, bachelors, lovers, young men and old, whole men and cripples, invalids, imbeciles, brutes and lofty spirits — thus do they continue to walk to the very end, to the moment of their death. The women, a little wiser, wait for them to make up their minds: but they too, even in the moment of surrender, with sobbing breath and eves half-closed, they too continue to watch the procession and sometimes give a sign that they are still free. So it is in the towns.