The Earth Page 12

  That night, as on almost every other night, Hourdequin had gone to Jacqueline's bedroom, the little maid's bedroom that he had allowed her to decorate with a floral wallpaper, cambric curtains and mahogany furniture. Despite her ever-increasing power, she had met fierce resistance every time she had attempted to sleep with him in his dead wife's bedroom, which he wished to keep inviolate as a last sign of respect. She was deeply offended by this, realizing full well that she would never really be the mistress of the house until she was sleeping in the old oak four-poster with its red cotton curtains.

  As day broke, Jacqueline awoke and she remained lying on her back, wide awake, while the farmer still snored on beside her. In the snug warmth of the bed, her dark eyes were pursuing exciting fancies and her slim, half-naked body throbbed with a sudden wave of desire. Yet the pretty young woman still hesitated; finally she made up her mind and stepped lightly over her master's body, holding her nightdress tucked up and with such agility that he felt nothing; and without making a sound, her hands hot and trembling with sudden lust, she slipped on her petticoat. But she knocked against a chair and he, too, opened his eyes.

  ‘Good Lord, you're getting dressed… Where are you going?’

  ‘I'm worried about the bread, I'm going to have a look.’

  Hourdequin muttered something and then went back to sleep, surprised and vaguely doubtful at the reason she had given, his head still full of sleep. What a strange idea, the bread didn't need any attention from her at this time of day. He woke up again with a start, seized by a sudden suspicion. Seeing that she was no longer there, he cast a bewildered and rather bleary eye round the maid's room, where he had left his slippers, pipe and razor. So the randy bitch was after a farm-hand again! It took him a couple of minutes to clear his head as he went over the whole story in his mind.

  His father, Isidore, was descended from an old peasant family who had made good and risen to the ranks of the bourgeoisie in the sixteenth century. They had all been excisemen: one of them the manager of a salt warehouse in Chartres, another a superintendent in Châteaudun; and Isidore, who had been orphaned when young, found himself with some sixty thousand francs, when, having lost his post at the age of twenty-six as a result of the Revolution, he hit on the idea of making his fortune by exploiting those thieving republican rogues who were selling off the national estates. As he knew the district very well, he sniffed around, did a few sums, and bought the three hundred and seventy acres of La Borderie, all that remained of the former Rognes-Bouqueval demesne, for thirty thousand francs, about a fifth of their real value. Not a single peasant farmer had dared to take the risk with his own money: lawyers and financiers were the only people to profit from this decision of the Revolution. In any case, it was purely a speculative venture, because Isidore had no thought of taking over all the responsibilities of running a farm, but of selling it at its real price at the end of the troubles, thereby making a fivefold profit. But then came the Directoire and the price of property continued to fall, so he was unable to realize the profit which he had hoped for. Left saddled with the land, he now became so imprisoned by it that, since he obstinately refused to let any of it go, he decided to exploit it himself, with the hope of making his fortune this way. At about this time he married the daughter of a neighbouring farmer, who brought him another hundred and twenty-five acres, thereby making him the owner of five hundred acres in all. Thus it was that this townsman of peasant stock went back to agriculture but on a grand scale, a landowning aristocrat replacing the old all-powerful feudal nobility.

  His only son, Alexandre, born in 1804 and sent to a private school in Châteaudun, turned out to be a hopeless scholar. He had a passion for farming and preferred to leave school and help his father, thereby disappointing a further hope of the latter, who had wanted to sell up and have his son trained for some liberal profession. The young man was twenty-seven when his father died and he became the owner of La Borderie. He was in favour of new methods; his prime concern when he married was not property but money because, in his view, the chief cause of inefficient farming was lack of capital; and he found the dowry he wanted, fifty thousand francs, by marrying a sister of the notary Baillehache, a spinster of ripe age, five years his senior, extremely ugly but kind and gentle. Then there began his struggle with his five hundred acres, a long struggle which had started cautiously but little by little became more and more feverish as a result of various miscalculations and disappointments; a struggle waged unceasingly from day to day and season to season and which, although it failed to make him rich, enabled him to live on a grand scale like the full-blooded man he was, determined never to deny himself any satisfaction he sought. In recent years, things had become even worse. His wife had produced two children: a boy, who had gone into the army as he hated farming, and had just been promoted captain after the battle of Solferino; and a sensitive charming girl, the apple of his eye, to whom he intended to bequeath La Borderie since his ungrateful son had chosen a life of adventure. And then, in the middle of the harvest, he lost his wife. The following autumn, his daughter died. It was a terrible blow. Since his son, the captain, did not put in an appearance even once a year, the father found himself suddenly alone, his future a blank now that he no longer had the incentive of working for posterity. But if his heart bled inwardly, he stood firm, fierce and autocratic that he was. When the peasant farmers jeered at his machinery and hoped disaster would overtake this townsman foolhardy enough to try his hand at their trade, he dug in his heels. And anyway, what else could he do? The land held him in an ever tighter grip: all his work and the capital he had committed held him increasingly a prisoner and the only way out now was to be overtaken by some disaster.

  The burly Hourdequin, with his broad ruddy face and only his tiny, refined hands as a reminder of his middle-class origins, had always been a despot where sexual relations with his servants were concerned. Even when his wife was alive, he went through the lot, as a matter of course, without a second thought, as his due. If the daughters of poor peasants sometimes escape by going away to learn dressmaking, none of the girls who go into service on farms avoid falling into the clutches of some man, either the farm-hands or their master. When Jacqueline was taken on at La Borderie as an act of charity, Madame Hourdequin was still alive; her father Cognet, an old drunkard, used to thrash her and she was so skinny and wretched-looking that you could see her bones through her rags. And people thought her so ugly that little boys would boo her. She looked no more than fifteen years old, though in fact she was at least eighteen. She became the skivvy of the household and was given all the dirty jobs, washing up, looking after the farmyard, cleaning out the animals, which made her filthier than ever, as grubby a girl as you would find anywhere. However, after the death of the farmer's wife, she seemed to spruce herself up. All the farm-hands tumbled her in the hay; not a single man passed through the farmyard gate without climbing on top of her; and one day, when she had gone down into the cellar with Hourdequin, although he had till then held back, he too tried to have a go at this ugly little slattern; but she offered such furious resistance and scratched and bit so much that he was forced to leave her alone. From that moment onwards her success was assured. She held out for six months and then surrendered her bare flesh inch by inch. She had levitated from the farmyard to the kitchen as the official servant; next, she took on a skivvy to help her, and then, now quite the lady, had a maid to serve her. Now the former little slut had developed into a shrewd, pretty, firm-breasted, very dark brunette, whose thinness belied the wiry strength of her limbs. She was flirtatious and extravagant and smothered herself in scent, although she was still at heart rather a grubby girl. All the same, the people of Rognes and the farmers in the neighbourhood were still surprised at the affair: how on earth could a rich man have fallen for such a little slip of a girl, not even plump or pretty, in fact for that Cognet girl, the daughter of that drunkard Cognet whom everyone had seen breaking stones for the last twenty years! What a fine father-in
-law that would be! And such a notorious trollop! And they failed to realize that this trollop was their vengeance, the revenge of the village against the farm, of the wretched farm labourer against the prosperous bourgeois who had become a big landowner. At the dangerous age of fifty-five, Hourdequin was going soft, a victim of his lust and feeling the need for Jacqueline in the same way as someone has a physical need for bread and water. When she wanted to be very nice to him, she would snuggle up to him like a cat to caress and pleasure him with an eagerness and lack of shame or scruple that would have brought a blush to the cheek of a whore, and, in return for such moments, he would beg her not to leave when he had quarrelled with her and, in a sudden explosion of outrage and revolt, had threatened to throw her out of the house.

  Last night, for example, he had slapped her face when she had made a scene in order to sleep in the bed in which his wife had died; and she had kept him at arm's length, giving him a slap whenever he tried to approach her, because although she continued to treat herself to the farm-hands she kept him strictly rationed, whipping up his desire so as to increase her power over him. And so as he lay that morning in this warm, stuffy room among the untidy bed clothes where he could still smell her scent, he was once more overcome by anger and desire. He had long sensed that she was continually betraying him. He jumped out of bed and said out loud:

  ‘Ah, if I catch you at it, you bitch!’

  He quickly dressed and went downstairs. Jacqueline had hurried out through the silent house, still barely light in the early dawn. As she went through the farmyard, she drew back for a second when she saw that old Soulas the shepherd was already up… But she was in too excited a state to stop.

  Why worry! She kept away from the stables containing the farm's fifteen horses, where the farm's drivers slept, and went round the back, to the corner where Jean slept on some straw, with a blanket and not even a sheet. All breathless and shivering, she gave him a hug as he lay there asleep and, silencing him with a kiss, she whispered softly:

  ‘It's me, you silly. Don't be afraid… Come on, quickly…’

  But he was scared, for he never wanted to do it here because of the danger of being caught. The ladder leading to the hayloft was close at hand, so they climbed up it, leaving the trap-door open, and fell in each other's arms into the hay.

  ‘Oh, you silly boy, you silly boy,’ said Jacqueline rapturously, in her husky voice that seemed to come from deep down in her body.

  Jean Macquart had been at the farm for nearly two years. After leaving the army, he had landed up in Bazoches-le-Doyen with a friend, a carpenter like himself, and he had started working again for this man's father, a small village contractor who employed two or three workmen; but his heart was no longer in his job, his seven years of military service had left him empty, out of practice, and tired of wielding a saw or a plane, so that he seemed to have become a different man. In Plassans in the old days, he had hammered away, never having any gift for learning and barely knowing the three Rs, although he was very serious-minded, hard-working and determined to achieve a position of independence away from his dreadful family. Old Macquart had kept him completely subservient, like a daughter, took his girls away from under his nose, and every Saturday went to the workshop gate to help himself to his pay. So when his mother had succumbed to exhaustion and brutality, he followed the example of his sister Gervaise, who had just gone off to Paris with her lover; he ran away from home, too, to avoid having to keep his good-for-nothing father. And now he could no longer recognize himself, not that he, too, had become lazy, but the army had broadened his mind: politics, for example, which used to bore him, now interested him a great deal and he argued to himself over equality and fraternity. And then there was the habit of loafing around, the idleness and coarseness of the guardroom, the somnolent existence of garrison life, the wild rough-and-tumble of war. So he would down his tools and idly think about his Italian campaign, feeling an urgent need to rest, a longing to stretch out on the grass and forget everything.

  One morning, his employer sent him to do some repairs at La Borderie. There was a good month's work, bedrooms to be refloored and doors and windows to be made good all over the house. He liked it up there and managed to take six weeks over the job. Meanwhile, his employer died and his son, who had married, left to set up his business where his wife's parents were living. Jean stayed on at La Borderie, working for himself; there was always a bit of rotten wood needing replacing somewhere; then, as they were starting the harvest, he lent a hand and stayed on another six weeks; so that the farmer, seeing how well he was taking to farming, finally took him on permanently. In less than a year the former carpenter had become a good farm-hand, carting, ploughing, sowing and scything, peacefully working on the land in which he hoped finally to satisfy his need to relax… So he had done with sawing and planing. And he seemed a born farmer, with his slow, equable temperament, his love of fixed, regular tasks and his bovine placidity inherited from his mother. At first he was delighted, enjoying the countryside that peasants themselves never look at, enjoying it through sentimental memories of things he had read, ideas of simplicity, virtue and perfect bliss which you find in little moral tales written for children.

  If truth be known, there was another reason why he liked the farm. While he was mending the doors, the Cognet girl had come to visit him and opened her legs amongst the shavings on the floor. It was she in fact who led him on, unable to resist the sturdy limbs of such a well-built young man, whose massive regular features gave promise of vigorous sexual prowess. He succumbed and went on succumbing, for fear of appearing stupid, and tormented in his turn by his need for this vicious little creature who was so adept at arousing a man's desires. But secretly his native decency had been protesting. It wasn't right to go with Monsieur Hourdequin's girl in view of the debt of gratitude he felt towards him. Of course, he invented reasons: she wasn't the farmer's wife, she was nothing but a little trollop; and since she slept around with so many other men, he might just as well enjoy the pleasure as leave it to them. But these excuses did not prevent him from becoming more and more uneasy as he saw the farmer becoming fonder and fonder of her. It would certainly all end badly.

  In the hayloft, Jean and Jacqueline were breathing as quietly as possible when his alert ear heard the ladder creak. He leapt to his feet and, at the risk of breaking his neck, jumped down through the hole through which the fodder was thrown… At that very moment, Hourdequin's head appeared at the other end on a level with the opening of the trap-door. With one glance he took in the vague figure of a man disappearing and the woman's belly as she lay there with open legs. He was so wild with rage that he did not think of climbing down to see who the lover was, and with a slap on the face which would have felled an ox he knocked Jacqueline down as she was rising to her knees.

  ‘You whore!’

  She screamed back, furiously denying what was so obvious.

  ‘It's not true!’

  He was tempted to stamp his heel on the belly which he had seen naked and exposed in her frenzied animal lust.

  ‘I saw him… Tell me the truth or I'll kill you!’

  ‘No, I won't. It's not true.’

  And when she finally managed to stand up, with her skirt properly adjusted, she became insolent, brazenly determined to rely on her complete mastery over him.

  ‘Anyway, what business is it of yours? Am I your wife? Since you don't want me to sleep in your bed, I'm free to sleep where I like.’

  She spoke in her husky, caressing voice, as though making fun of him.

  ‘Go on, get out of the way, I want to get down… I'll be leaving this evening.’

  ‘You'll leave straight away.’

  ‘No, tonight… It'll give you time to think it over!’

  He was still quivering and beside himself with rage, not knowing where to vent his wrath. Even though he no longer had the courage to throw her out of the house at once, what immense pleasure it would have given him to boot out her lover! But ho
w could he catch him now? He had gone straight up to the hayloft, following the trail of open doors, and when he came down the four carters in the stables were getting dressed, as was Jean in his little corner. Which one of the five was it? It might as well be this one as that, or perhaps the whole lot, one after another. All the same, he hoped that the man would betray himself as he issued his instructions for the morning's work; they were all to work inside the farm; nor did he go out himself but roamed round the building, with clenched fists, casting sidelong glances here and there, longing to lay into someone.

  After seven o'clock breakfast, his irritated visit of inspection put the whole household in fear and trembling. At La Borderie there were the five drivers for five ploughs, three threshers, two cowmen who worked in the farmyard, one shepherd and a boy to look after the pigs, twelve hands in all in addition to the maidservant. First of all he took the latter to task because she had failed to hang the oven shovels up on the ceiling after use. Then he explored the two barns, one for oats and the second one, an immense building as tall as a church, for wheat, with doors sixteen feet wide; here he told off the threshers, whose flails, he asserted, were cutting the straw too fine. Then he went on through the cowshed, infuriated to see that it was in good order, with the central gangway properly washed and the troughs clean. He failed to find any way of getting at the cowmen but, checking the water tanks, which they also looked after, he noticed that one of the downpipes was blocked by a sparrow's nest. As in every farm in Beauce, the rainwater from the roofs was jealously collected with the help of a complicated system of guttering. So he gruffly enquired whether they were going to let him die of thirst because of a few sparrows. The storm finally broke when he came to the drivers. Although the fifteen horses in the stable had been given fresh litter, he began shouting that it was disgusting to let them lie in such filthy conditions. Then, ashamed of his unfairness and still more exasperated, as he was visiting the furthest reaches of the farm buildings, the four sheds where the instruments and tools were kept, he was delighted to see a plough with both handles broken. He flew into a rage. Did those five buggers positively enjoy smashing up his equipment? He'd pay the whole lot off, all five of them, yes, all five, so that no one would feel hard done by. While he was abusing them, he watched them searchingly, hoping for one of them to turn pale or tremble and give himself away. No one stirred and he went away with a despairing gesture.