The Earth Page 23

  The Fouans and Delhommes left and Monsieur Charles as well. La Grande walked round the table to see if there was anything left, then she also decided to leave, after telling Jean that the Buteaus would finish in the gutter.

  While the others were stumbling drunkenly around over the stones, you could hear her firm heavy footsteps and the regular tapping of her stick as she went off home along the path.

  Tron had hitched up the gig for Madame Jacqueline, and as she was climbing in she turned round:

  ‘Are you coming back with us, Jean?… I don't think you are, are you?’

  The young man, who was about to get in, changed his mind, happy to leave her alone with his fellow farm-hand. He watched her snuggle up against the large body of her new lover and could not refrain from laughing once they had disappeared. He would be going back on foot and went to sit down for a second on the stone bench in the courtyard, next to Françoise who had also sat down there, bemused by the heat and fatigue and waiting for the rest to go. The Buteaus had already gone up to bed and she had promised to shut everything up before retiring herself.

  ‘Oh, isn't it lovely here!’ she murmured after a good five minutes' silence.

  And silence fell again, marvellously peaceful. The night sky was dotted with stars; it was beautifully cool. The scent of hay was so strong as it rose from the meadows along the Aigre that it filled the air with a fragrance of wild flowers.

  ‘Yes, it's lovely,’ Jean finally replied. ‘It makes you feel good.’

  She made no reply and he realized that she had fallen asleep. She was slipping down and leaning against his shoulder. And so he stayed for another hour, with all kinds of ideas running vaguely through his head. Lustful thoughts came into his mind but not for long. She was too young and it seemed to him that, if he waited, she alone would grow older and come closer to him.

  ‘I say, Françoise, it's bedtime. We'll catch cold.’

  She woke with a start.

  ‘Yes, that's true, we'll be better in bed… Goodnight, Jean.’

  ‘Goodnight, Françoise.’

  PART THREE

  Chapter 1

  SO now at last Buteau had his share of the land on which he had been casting such covetous eyes for two and a half years, even while obstinately refusing to accept it in a frenzy of mingled longing and resentment. He himself did not understand why he had been so stubborn when at heart he had been longing to sign the deed of transfer; but he was afraid of making a fool's bargain and he could not reconcile himself to the idea of not inheriting everything, all the nineteen acres which had now been carved up and dispersed. Ever since his acceptance, his passion had been satisfied in the fierce joy of owning his land; and his joy was increased by the thought that he had got the better of his sister and brother, for now that the new road ran alongside his land, his share was worth more. Every time he met them he greeted them with a malicious twinkle in his eye, which said:

  ‘I diddled them in the end!’

  And that was not all. He was also delighted at his long deferred marriage, which had brought him another five acres, adjacent to his own. The thought that it would be necessary for the two sisters to share out their own inheritance never entered his head, or if it did, he thought of it as so far in the future that he hoped in the meantime to find a way of avoiding it. Including Françoise's share, he had eight acres of ordinary arable, four of wheat and roughly two and a half of vine; and he was going to keep them, he would sooner be torn limb from limb and, above all, he would never give up the Cornailles plot, next to the road, which now comprised nearly seven and a half acres. Neither his brother nor sister had anything comparable and his face glowed with pride whenever he spoke of it.

  A year passed by and this first year of ownership was sheer delight for Buteau. Never had he ploughed so deeply when he was working for others: this was his land and he wished to force his way into it and make it fruitful, like a woman. At night he would come home exhausted with his ploughshare shining like silver. In March he harrowed his wheat and in April his oats, with endless care and unstinting exertion. When there was no further work to do in his fields he would go back and contemplate them like a lover. He would go the rounds, bending down and, with his usual gesture, picking up a handful, a whole lump of rich soil which he enjoyed crumbling and letting slip between his fingers, particularly pleased when he could feel that it was neither too dry nor too wet, with the good smell of bread on its way.

  And as he watched, the plain of Beauce spread out its carpet of green from November to July, from the moment when the first green spikes poke through till the time the lofty stalks turn yellow. Without leaving the house he devoured it lovingly with his eyes; he had unbarricaded the back kitchen window, which overlooked the plain: and he would station himself there and look out over twenty-five miles of bare plateau spread out beneath the bowl of the sky. Not a single tree, nothing but the telegraph poles along the road from Châteaudun to Orléans stretching in one straight line as far as the eye could see. At first there was nothing to see on the broad brown fields but barely perceptible touches of green along the ground. Then this tender green grew bolder, more velvety, and became almost uniform in colour. Then the wisps of corn grew and thickened out until each plant took on its special hue; he could pick out from afar the yellowy green of wheat, the blue-green of oats, the grey-green of the rye, in fields stretching out in all directions as far as the horizon, amid the red patches of clover. This is the time when Beauce is lovely, dressed in youthful spring attire, uniform and refreshing to the eye in its monotony: the stalks grew longer and turned into a sea, a sea of grain, heaving and deep and limitless. On mornings when the weather was fine a pink mist would melt away, and as the sun rose higher in the limpid air, a gentle wind would blow in steady gusts, hollowing the fields out into waves which started on the skyline and swept along until they died away on the further horizon. The fields quivered and grew paler, the wheat was shot through with tints of old gold, the oats were tinged with blue whilst the rye trembled with glints of purple. And as one undulation followed the next the fields heaved ceaselessly under the ocean breath. As evening fell, the walls of the distant houses in the sun's rays looked like white sails and the steeples reared up like masts from the folds of the earth. It grew cold and damp and the increasing gloom heightened the impression of a murmuring open sea; and a wood vanishing in the distance was like part of a sinking continent.

  In bad weather, too, Buteau looked out over Beauce, spread out at his feet, like a fisherman on a cliff looking down at the raging sea and at the tempest taking the bread from his mouth. He saw a violent storm and the livid murky light of a dark cloud, with the rolling thunder and the fiery red flashes of lightning along the tips of the grass. He saw a whirlwind coming more than a dozen miles away, first as a thin tawny yellow cloud spinning like a rope and then a howling, monstrous mass hurtling towards him, leaving behind it devastated crops, a wake two miles wide, all cut and broken down, razed to the ground. His own fields had not suffered and he commiserated with those whose had with secret gratification. And as the wheat grew tall, his pleasure increased. Already a grey little village had disappeared on the skyline like an island swallowed up by the rising tide of green. There now remained only the roofs of La Borderie which were submerged in their turn. All that was left was a windmill with its sails, like a piece of wreckage. Everywhere there was wheat, a vast green sea of wheat, invading and flooding the whole land.

  ‘By God,’ he would say every evening as he sat down to eat, ‘if the summer isn't too dry, we shan't go short of bread!’

  The Buteaus were now settled in. The couple had taken over the large bedroom downstairs and Françoise had to make do with the small upstairs bedroom, formerly her father's but which had been cleaned out and furnished with a trestle bed, an old chest of drawers, a table and two chairs. She took care of the cows and led her life as before. However, in this peaceful existence there was a hidden source of disagreement, the question of the sharing ou
t of the two sisters' estate which had been left in suspense. Immediately after the elder sister's marriage, old Fouan, the younger girl's guardian, had insisted that the property should now be divided to avoid any trouble later on. But Buteau had protested. What was the point? Françoise was too young, she didn't need her land and had anything really been changed? She was living with her sister as before, she had board and lodging and her clothes were being paid for. In fact, she had certainly nothing to complain about. At all these reasons the old man shook his head: you never knew what might happen, the best thing was to get everything straight; and the girl herself was insistent that she wanted to know what her share was, even if she then left her brother-in-law in charge of it. But the latter, with his heartiness, his blustering good humour and his determination, had had his way. The subject was dropped and he kept harping all the time on the joys of family life, with everyone living happily together.

  ‘I'm all for friendly feelings, that's what we need!’

  And, in fact, for the first ten months there had never been any quarrel either between the sisters or in the household. Then, slowly, things turned sour. It began with fits of ill humour. There were sulks and hard words and underneath it all the thought of ‘mine and yours’ continued to simmer and gradually spoilt their friendly relationship.

  Certainly nothing remained of the mutual affection or admiration that Lise and Françoise used to feel. Nobody ever saw them now with their arms round each other's waists, draped in the same shawl, going for an evening walk. It was as though they had been separated; there was a growing coldness between the two. Ever since a male had come on the scene, it seemed to Françoise that her sister was being taken away from her. She had hitherto shared everything with Lise; but she did not share the man and so he had become the foreign body, the obstacle blocking the way to her heart where she was now living alone. She would go away without kissing her sister when Buteau had kissed her, offended as though someone else had drunk out of her glass. Where ownership was concerned she still held with passionate conviction to her childhood notions of ‘that's mine, that's yours’, and since her sister now belonged to someone else she would surrender her, but she did want what was hers, half the land and half the house.

  There was another reason for Françoise's anger which she herself would have been unable to formulate. Till now, with her father a widower, the house had been chilly and lacking love, with nothing to disturb her peace of mind. Now it was occupied by a male, a coarse male used to lifting up girls' skirts under hedges; who made the house shake with his boisterous love-making and whose grunts and gasps could be heard through the cracks in the panelling. She knew all about it, she had learnt it from watching animals and she was disgusted and exasperated. During the day, she preferred to go out and let them get on with their beastliness undisturbed. At night, if they began to romp about after supper, she would call out to them to wait at least until she had finished the washing up. And she would flounce up to her bedroom, slamming the doors and muttering inarticulate insults between her clenched teeth: filthy swine! filthy swine! In spite of everything, she still imagined she could hear what was going on downstairs. With her head buried in her pillow and her sheet pulled up to her eyes, she would tremble in a fever of revolt, hallucinated by the agonizing visions and sounds of her budding sexuality.

  The worst thing was that, seeing her so preoccupied by all this, Buteau kept teasing her for fun. Well, how about it? What would she have to say when it came to her turn? Lise would laugh too, seeing no harm in it. And then he would explain his own ideas on the subject: since God had provided everyone with this pleasure that cost nothing, it was quite legitimate to get a bellyful of it, as much as you could; but beware of children, they didn't want any more of them! People always had too many of them when they weren't married, through sheer stupidity. Take Jules, for example, what a terrible surprise he had been but he had to accept it. But when you were married, you had to take things seriously, he'd sooner be gelded like a cat than have another one. No thanks! Another mouth to feed in a house where people were hungry enough already. So he kept his eye open and took care when he was with his wife, who was so fat, the saucy bitch, that she'd swallow it up like a shot, he would say, adding that he believed in ploughing but not sowing. Wheat, yes, as much wheat as the belly of the earth could produce, but no more brats, never again!

  And through constantly hearing all these details and being surrounded by this sexual activity that she could sense and almost touch, Françoise became more and more disturbed. People said that her character was changing and indeed she was continually subject to inexplicable fits of moodiness: cheerful, then sad and then sullen and bad-tempered. In the morning she looked darkly at Buteau when he unconcernedly walked half naked through the kitchen. She and her sister would quarrel over trifles, over a cup that she had just broken: wasn't it her cup as well, or at least half of it? Couldn't she break half of everything if she felt like it? On all such questions of ownership, their squabbles became embittered and their resentment would last for several days.

  At about this time Buteau himself went through a dreadfully black period. The land was suffering from a terrible drought, with not a drop of rain having fallen for six weeks; and he would come back with his fists clenched, distracted at the sight of his crops in jeopardy, his rye stunted, his oats scanty and his wheat scorched before it was formed. It made him positively ill, like the wheat itself, with contractions of the stomach, cramp in his limbs, shrunken and bent with worry and anger. And so one morning, for the first time, he crossed swords with Françoise. It was warm and he had left his shirt open and his trousers unbuttoned, ready to fall off his backside, after having a wash at the well; and as he was sitting down to his soup, Françoise, who was serving him, went round behind him for a moment. Finally she exploded, red in the face:

  ‘Look, tuck in your shirt, it's not decent.’

  He was in a bad humour and lost his temper:

  ‘For Christ's sake, can't you leave me alone? If you don't like it, don't look… Perhaps you're keen to try a bit of it, you snivelling brat, since you're always on about it!’

  She stammered and blushed still more when Lise made the mistake of adding:

  ‘He's quite right, you're becoming a damned nuisance… Clear out if you don't feel free at home.’

  ‘All right, I'll clear out,’ Françoise said furiously and she went out, slamming the door.

  But the following day, Buteau had become cheerful, conciliatory and good-humoured. During the night, it had clouded over and for the last twelve hours a warm, gentle, penetrating rain had been falling, the sort of summer rain that revives the countryside; and he had opened the window onto the plain, and as soon as it was dawn he stood there watching the water with his hands in his pockets, beaming as he kept saying:

  ‘We'll be in the money now that God's doing the work for us. Yes, damn it, this sort of day, when you just sit doing nothing, is worth all those days working like a black and getting nothing for it.’

  The rain was still pouring down, on and on, slowly and gently; and he could hear Beauce drinking it up, thirsty Beauce that had no springs or rivers of its own. Everywhere there was a babbling and gurgling of water, full of comfort and joy. Everything was soaking up the downpour and growing green again. Once again the wheat was young and healthy, firm and straight, its head held high with the ears all ready to swell to immense size, bursting with flour. And like the earth and the wheat, he was drinking it in through every pore, relaxed and refreshed and cured, exclaiming loudly as he went back to look out of his window:

  ‘Go on! Get on with it! It's raining five-franc pieces.’

  Suddenly he heard the door open and, turning round, he was surprised to recognize old Fouan.

  ‘Goodness me, it's you, Father. Have you been frog hunting?’

  After struggling with a big blue umbrella, the old man came in, leaving his clogs on the doorstep.

  ‘What a soaking,’ he said simply. ‘It's won
derful, just what we wanted.’

  Ever since his land had been finally split up a year ago, with the transfer signed, sealed and delivered, he had only one occupation left, which was to go round looking at it. He could always be seen prowling round it and taking an interest, sad or cheerful according to the state of the crops, loudly telling off his children because things were not being done as they used to be and it was their fault if things were going badly. The rain had cheered him up, too.

  ‘So you've just dropped in to see us on the way?’ Buteau asked.

  Françoise, who had not said anything as yet, stepped forward and said flatly:

  ‘No, I asked Uncle to come.’

  Lise was standing at the table shelling peas; she stopped with a sudden scowl and stood waiting, her hands dangling. Buteau, who had first of all clenched his fist, assumed his jocular air again, determined not to become annoyed.

  ‘Yes,’ the old man slowly explained. ‘Young Françoise came to have a talk with me yesterday… You can see I was right to want to settle everything straight away. If everyone has his share, there's no cause to fall out, in fact it's the opposite, it stops squabbling… And the time has come to put things in order once and for all. After all, she has the right to know exactly what's hers. Otherwise I'd be to blame… So we'll fix a day when we can all go to see Monsieur Baillehache.’

  But Lise was unable to restrain herself any longer:

  ‘Why doesn't she set the police on to us? Anyone would think we're robbing her, for heaven's sake! Do I go about telling people she's bloody impossible to get on with?’

  Françoise was about to reply in similar vein when Buteau, who had playfully caught hold of her from behind, exclaimed:

  ‘What a lot of nonsense… We rag each other but we're still fond of each other really. That would be a fine thing if sisters couldn't agree!’