The Earth Read online

  As he was completing his tour of inspection at the sheep-pen, Hourdequin thought he might question the old shepherd, Soulas, a man of sixty-five who had been working on the farm for half a century without ever saving a penny of his pay, all squandered by his wife, a loose-living drunken woman whom he had, quite recently, at last had the pleasure of burying. He was very much afraid that he might soon be dismissed because of his age. His master might perhaps be able to help him; but who could tell whether a master might not die first? And did they ever give you anything for a pipe of baccy or a drop of drink? Moreover, he had made an enemy of Jacqueline, whom he loathed with all the hatred of a jealous old servant disgusted by the rapid rise to fortune of a newcomer. When she now ordered him about, he could not bear the thought that he had seen her in rags sitting in the dung. She would certainly have dismissed him had she felt powerful enough, and that made him cautious, for he wanted to keep his job. So he avoided falling foul of her although he felt certain of his master's support.

  The sheep-pen occupied the entire rear of the farmyard, one single covered building ninety yards long in which the eight hundred sheep belonging to the farm were kept separated by hurdles: in one part the ewes, in various groups; in another the lambs; in yet a third, the rams. The male lambs were castrated when two months old and reared for sale, whereas the females were kept in order to provide replacements for the ewes, the oldest of which were sold each year; and the rams covered the young ewes at regular intervals. They were crossbred Leicesters and merinos, splendid animals, gentle and stupid-looking, with heavy heads and big round noses like violently passionate men. When you went into the sheep-pen you felt suffocated by the powerful smell of ammonia rising from the litter, where fresh straw was piled on top of the old for three months on end. There were hooks along the walls so that the racks could be raised as the level of the manure rose. Yet it was airy, with wide windows, and the floor of the hayloft above was made of movable beams, some of which would be removed as the amount of fodder diminished. Moreover, it was said that the organic heat provided by these soft, warm, fermenting layers of straw were necessary for the proper growth of the sheep.

  As Hourdequin pushed open one of the doors he caught a glimpse of Jacqueline disappearing through another. She had also thought of Soulas and was uneasy because she was sure that she had been sighted on her way to Jean; but the old man had not responded and did not seem to understand why, contrary to her usual custom, she was making herself agreeable to him. But the sight of the young woman leaving the sheepfold where she would normally never go added fuel to the farmer's uncertainty.

  ‘Well, Soulas,’ he asked. ‘Anything new this morning?’

  The shepherd, a very tall, lean man with a long, wrinkled face, as though rough-hewn out of a heart of oak, replied slowly:

  ‘No, sir, nothing new at all except that the shearers are, coming to start work presently.’

  The farmer chatted for a moment in order not to appear to be questioning him. The sheep, which had been kept there ever since the first frosts of Hallowmas, would shortly be let out, about the middle of May, as soon as they could be taken into the clover. The cows, however, were not generally taken out to pasture before the end of the harvest. This plain of Beauce, dry and without any natural pasture though it was, produced good meat nonetheless; and if there was no beef breeding, it was due to sheer laziness and conservatism. And indeed, each farm fattened only five or six pigs for their own consumption.

  Hourdequin was stroking the ewes with his hot hand as they came running up, lifting their heads and showing their pale, soft eyes; while the lambs penned in further along scampered up bleating to press against the hurdles.

  ‘Well, old Soulas, so you haven't seen anything this morning?’ he asked again, looking him straight in the eyes.

  The old man had seen something, but what was the point of saying anything? His dead wife, the tipsy slut, had taught him all about vicious females and male stupidity. Perhaps it was possible that even if he gave the Cognet girl away, she might prove the stronger of the two and then they would take it out on him, so as to get rid of an awkward witness.

  ‘Didn't see anything, nothing at all!’ he repeated, blank-faced, without twitching an eyelid.

  When Hourdequin walked across the farmyard again he noticed Jacqueline still lurking around, nervously trying to eavesdrop and afraid of what might have been said in the sheepfold. She was pretending to see to her poultry, all the six hundred chicken, ducks and pigeons who fluttered and squawked and scratched at the dung-pit, creating an incessant din, and when the boy who looked after the pigs upset a bucket of clean water that he was carrying over to them, she even relieved her feelings by clipping him round the ear. But one glance at the farmer reassured her: he knew nothing, the old man had kept a still tongue in his head. She could afford to be more brazen than ever.

  So at lunchtime she was aggressively cheerful. The heavy work had not yet begun and so there were only four meals a day, bread and milk at seven o'clock, toasted bread at noon, bread and cheese at four o'clock and soup and bacon at midnight. They ate in the kitchen, an immense room containing a long table with benches along each side. The only sign of progress was a kitchen range occupying one corner of the vast chimney-piece. At the end, you could see the black opening of the oven; and there were shining saucepans and ancient utensils hanging tidily along the smoke-blackened walls. As the maid, a fat ugly girl, had baked that morning, a lovely smell of warm bread was wafting from the open bread-bin.

  ‘So you've lost your appetite this morning?’ Jacqueline asked Hourdequin saucily as he came in last.

  Ever since the death of his wife and daughter he took his meals with his servants, as in olden days; he sat at one end, on a chair, while his servant and mistress did the same at the other end. There were fourteen in all and the maid served them.

  When the farmer had sat down without replying, Jacqueline told the maid to take care of the toast. These were slices of toasted bread, broken into a soup plate, then soaked in wine and sweetened with lap, which was the old name for molasses. She asked for another spoonful and pretended to make a fuss of the men; all the time she kept making jokes which aroused loud guffaws. Every sentence had a double meaning and she reminded them that she was leaving that evening: easy come, easy go, and if this was your last chance, you'd be sorry if you didn't put your finger in the sauce for the last time. The shepherd was eating with a blank look while the farmer said nothing, and did not seem to understand either. In order not to betray himself, Jean was obliged to laugh with the others, despite his annoyance; he was not at all proud of his conduct in all this.

  After lunch, Hourdequin gave his instructions for the afternoon. There were only one or two small jobs to finish outside: they were rolling the oats and finishing the ploughing of the fallow land, before beginning to cut the lucerne and the clover. So he kept two men back, Jean and one other, to clean out the hayloft. He himself, now almost at the end of his tether, with his ears buzzing from the rush of blood to his head and feeling very miserable, started to wander around without knowing what to do to calm his nerves. The sheep-shearers had settled down under one of the open barns, in a corner of the farmyard. He went over and stood watching them.

  There were five of them, gaunt, yellow-faced fellows crouching down with their long shining steel shears. The shepherd brought along the ewes with their feet tied, like goatskins, and lined them up on the mud floor of the hangar where all they could do was lift their heads and bleat. Then, when one of the shearers caught hold of one, she would stop bleating and submit in her bulky thick coat which had a hard black outer crust of grease and dust. Then, with a rapid snip of the shears, she came out of her fleece like a hand out of a glove, fresh and pink amidst her golden, snow-like inner wool. Held on its back between the knees of a tall lean man, a ewe with its thighs held apart and head held straight up was displaying its white belly, which was hidden and quivering like the skin of someone being undressed. The shearers wer
e paid three sous per animal and a good workman could shear twenty a day.

  Absorbed in his thoughts, Hourdequin was remembering that the price of wool had fallen to eight sous a pound; and he would have to sell it quickly before it dried out too much, which made it lose weight. The previous year, sheep-pest had decimated the flocks in Beauce. Everything was going from bad to worse, ruin was staring him in the face, the land had become bankrupt ever since the price of corn had begun to fall steadily every month. And preoccupied with all his farming problems, he left the farmyard, where he was finding it difficult to breathe freely, and went out to survey his land. His quarrels with the Cognet girl always ended like this: after having blustered and clenched his fists, he would throw up the sponge and go away sick at heart to seek the only consolation he could find, the sight of his wheat and oats, a sea of green stretching out to infinity.

  God, how he had come to love that land, with a passion which went far beyond the grasping avarice of a peasant, with a passion that was sentimental and almost intellectual, recognizing in it the Great Mother who had given him life and substance and to whose bosom he would return. At first, brought up on the land as a boy, his dislike of school and his urge to make a bonfire of all his books had sprung from the freedom he enjoyed, his wonderful rides across country gulping intoxicating draughts of the fresh air that blew from every quarter of the horizon. Later, having succeeded his father, his love of the land had grown into a deep, mature affection, as if he had become wedded to it in order to make it fructify. And this affection had continued to grow as he devoted all his time and money to it, his whole life, as to a good and fruitful wife whose whims and even whose betrayals he always forgave. Often he would lose patience when she was in one of her bad moods, when she devoured his seed and then, because of too much or too little water, refused to give a harvest; at such times, he was seized by doubt and he would even accuse himself of being an incompetent, or impotent male; if the land had not brought forth a child, the fault must be his. It was since then that the idea of adopting new methods had kept running through his head and had led him to experiment, full of regrets that he had been a dunce at school and had not followed courses at one of the agricultural colleges that both his father and he had made fun of. So many of his attempts were fruitless, so many experiments ended in failure; and his farm-hands damaged his machines and the artificial fertilizers on the market were a fraud! All his money had been swallowed up, La Borderie barely provided him with his daily bread and soon the agricultural crisis would finish him off. Never mind, he would stay on, held prisoner by his own land, and he would bury his bones there, wedded to it to the bitter end.

  That day, as soon as he was away from the farm, he thought of his son the captain. What a good job they could have made of it, the pair of them together. But he immediately put aside the thought of that idiot who preferred the sword to the ploughshare. No, he was childless now, he'd finish his days all alone. Then his mind turned to his neighbours, particularly the Coquarts, farmers who cultivated their land at Saint Just themselves, the father and mother, three sons and two daughters; and they were not doing much better, either. At La Chamade, Farmer Robiquet, whose lease was running out, had given up manuring his fields and was letting the estate go to rack and ruin. That's how it was, there was trouble all round, the only thing to do was to work till you dropped and not complain. Moreover, little by little, as he walked beside them, he found himself being gently lulled by these large green fields. A few April showers had brought the fodder crops on splendidly. The pink of the clover delighted him and he forgot everything else. Now he took a short cut over the ploughed land to see how his two carters were doing: the earth stuck to his shoes, he could feel how rich and fertile it was, almost as though it wanted to cling to him and embrace him; and once more he felt completely won over by it, he was recovering the strength and joy he had felt as a young man of thirty. Did any woman exist apart from the earth? Was the Cognet girl or any of the others of the slightest importance? They were merely a sort of plate, which anyone could eat out of and which you have to put up with as long as it's clean enough! Such a convincing excuse to explain his need for such a slut put the finishing touch to his good humour. He went for a three-hour walk and cracked a joke with a girl, the Coquarts' maid, in fact, who was coming back from Cloyes on a donkey and showing her legs.

  When Hourdequin came back to the farm, Jacqueline was in the farmyard saying goodbye to all the cats. There was always a whole host of them, a dozen, fifteen, twenty, nobody knew exactly, because the females had their litters in odd corners in the straw and then reappeared followed by five or six kittens. Next, Jacqueline went over to the kennels of the two sheepdogs, Emperor and Massacre, who could not bear her and growled.

  Despite all these farewells from the animals, supper was no different from usual. The farmer ate and chatted normally. Then, when the day was over, there was no further question of anyone leaving. Everyone went off to bed and the farm sank quietly into darkness.

  And that night, Jacqueline slept in the bedroom of the late Madame Hourdequin. It was the best bedroom, with a large bed in an alcove papered in red. It had a wardrobe, a bedside table, a high-backed Louis XV bedroom chair, and over the little mahogany bureau there glittered all the medals won by the farmer at agricultural shows, framed in a glass case. When the girl climbed into the marriage bed in her nightgown, she stretched herself out with her sensual, husky laugh and spread out her arms and thighs to take complete possession of it.

  Next day, when she went and draped herself on Jean's shoulders, he pushed her away. Now that the affair was becoming serious, it would be a dirty trick to behave like that and he refused to have anything more to do with it.

  Chapter 2

  A FEW days later, Jean was coming back from Cloyes one evening when, a mile or so away from Rognes, he was struck by the strange behaviour of a farm-cart in front of him. It seemed to be empty, for there was no one on the seat and the horse was making its own leisurely way back to its stable, like a homing animal left to itself. The young man was thus easily able to catch up with it. He stopped it and raised himself to look into the cart: there was a man lying on the floor, a short, fat old man who had fallen on his back; his face was so red that it looked almost black.

  Jean was so surprised that he exclaimed out loud:

  ‘It's a man! Is he asleep or is he drunk? My goodness, it's old Mouche, the father of those two girls up there! Good Lord, I think he's had it! What a business!’

  But although he had had a sudden stroke, Mouche was still breathing faintly, but with difficulty. So Jean laid him flat, with his head raised, got into the driver's seat and whipped the horse up to a trot to take the dying man back home before he died on his hands.

  When he arrived at the square in front of the church, whom should he see but Françoise standing in her doorway. She was amazed to see the young man in their cart driving their horse.

  ‘What's up?’ she enquired.

  ‘Your father's not very well.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Have a look.’

  She climbed onto a wheel and looked. For a second, she was stunned with surprise, seeming not to understand as she saw the convulsed purple face looking as though one half of it had been pulled violently upwards. Night was falling and a large tawny-yellow cloud cast a fiery light over the dying man.

  Suddenly, she started to sob and ran off to tell her sister.

  ‘Lise! Lise! Oh dear!’

  Left alone, Jean hesitated. They could hardly leave the old man lying on the floor of his cart. The house was three steps down from the level of the square and it did not seem easy to go down into this dark hole. Then he saw that on the side facing the road, on the left, there was another door opening into the yard, at the same level. This courtyard, quite large, was enclosed by a quickset hedge; two thirds of it were covered by a murky brown pond and there was half an acre of fruit and vegetable garden at the back. He let go of the horse, which went
in of its own accord and stopped in front of its stable beside the cowshed where there were two cows.

  Now Françoise and Lise appeared, weeping and crying out. The latter had given birth four months ago; she had been suckling her baby and in her bewilderment and surprise was still holding him in her arms; and he was screaming too. Françoise climbed up onto a wheel again and Lise on the other one; their cries of distress became even shriller, while on the floor of the cart Mouche was still breathing wheezily.

  ‘Daddy, do say something! What's the matter? For goodness' sake, what's wrong with you! Is it your head that makes you not say anything? Oh, Daddy, do speak, do say something!’

  ‘Get down, it's better to pull him out of there,’ Jean said sensibly.

  Instead of helping him, they merely exclaimed more loudly than ever. Fortunately, the wife of their neighbour Frimat, hearing the noise, appeared on the scene. She was a gaunt, lanky old woman who had been looking after her paralysed husband for the last two years and keeping him by cultivating their single acre of land with as much determination as any male. Quite unperturbed, she seemed to find the situation completely normal and lent a hand like a man. Jean grasped Mouche by the shoulders and dragged him until Frimat's wife was able to catch hold of his legs. Then they lifted him into the house.