The Earth Page 27

  A deathly silence was gradually settling on the whole room. People had stopped laughing and the peasants were looking uneasily at this tall drunken devil who was pouring out his odd jumble of ideas, the ideas of an old African trooper, a rolling stone, a tap-room politician. Above all it was the 1848 revolutionary talking, the humanitarian communist still praying at the altar of the Revolution of 1789.

  ‘Liberty, equality and fraternity! We've got to get back to the Revolution! We were diddled. The middle classes took the lot and, by God, we'll make them hand it back! Isn't one man as good as the next? For example, is it fair that that jackanapes up at La Borderie has all that land and I don't have any? I want my right, I want my share, everybody must have his share.’

  Bécu, too drunk to defend the powers that be, was nodding approvingly, without understanding. But with a sudden flash of good sense he raised an objection:

  ‘Yes, that's all very well, but the King's the King. What's mine isn't yours.’

  A murmur of approval ran through the room and Buteau returned to the fray:

  ‘Why listen to him, he ought to be put down?’

  People began laughing again and Jesus Christ completely lost control of himself. He stood up, banging his fists on the table:

  ‘You just wait!… I'll have a word with you, you dirty coward. I know you're very bold today because you've got the mayor on your side and the deputy mayor and our tuppenny ha'penny representative in Parliament. And you lick his boots and you're stupid enough to think that he's the big man and he'll help you sell your wheat. Well, let me tell you that I've got nothing to sell and you and the mayor and his deputy and Chédeville and the gendarmes can all lick my arse!… It'll be our turn to be the big men tomorrow and it won't only be me, it'll be all the poor buggers who've had enough of being starved and it'll be you as well when you've got tired of feeding the townsfolk, and not having enough bread to eat yourselves! The landowners will be wiped out! We'll smash 'em and the land will be for anyone who can take it. Can you understand, baby brother? I'll take your land and I'll shit on it!’

  ‘Come on out and I'll shoot you like a dog!’ shouted Buteau, so infuriated that he went out slamming the door.

  After listening with an impenetrable air, Lequeu had already left, being a civil servant who could not risk compromising himself any longer. Fouan and Delhomme were sitting abashed, hiding their faces in their tankards, knowing that if they intervened, the drunkard would bawl all the louder. At the neighbouring tables, the peasants were starting to become annoyed: so their property wasn't their own, someone would come and take it away from them? And they were growling and all ready to set on this communist and chuck him out when Jean stood up. He had not once taken his eyes off him or missed a single word, listening with a serious face as though trying to discover what truth there was in these ideas which revolted him.

  ‘You'd be wiser not to talk like that, Jesus Christ,’ he said quietly. ‘They're not things that ought to be said, and if you happen to be right, it's not very clever of you to say them, because you're putting yourself in the wrong.’

  Hearing this sensible, cool-headed comment, Jesus Christ immediately relapsed into calm. He sank back into his chair, remarking that he didn't really give a bugger. And he started playing his tricks again, kissing Bécu's wife, whose husband, overcome by drink, had gone to sleep with his head on the table. He finished off his grog, drinking it out of the salad bowl. In the thick smoky atmosphere, people were laughing again.

  Dancing was still going on at the far end of the barn; Clou was still blowing thunderously into his trombone, drowning the quavering sound of the young violinist. Sweat was pouring off everybody and adding its own rank smell to the reeking smoky lamps. All you could see was La Trouille's red bow as she swirled round and round in the arms of Nénesse and Delphin, in turn. Berthe was still there too, still faithful to her beau and dancing with no one else. Young men whom she had refused to dance with sat sneering in a corner; well, if that dope didn't mind if she hadn't got any, she was right to stick by him, because there were plenty of others who would certainly wait for her to grow some before thinking of marrying her, in spite of all her money.

  ‘Let's go to bed,’ Fouan said to Jean and Delhomme.

  Then, once they were outside and Jean had left them, the old man walked on in silence, seemingly turning over in his mind what he had just heard; and then, suddenly, as if this had decided him, he turned towards his son-in-law.

  ‘I'll be selling my house and moving in with you. It's agreed. Goodbye.’

  He walked slowly home, all alone. But his heart was full and his feet were stumbling on the dark road and in his grief and sorrow he was swaying like a drunken man. He was already landless and soon he would be homeless. It seemed to him that his old roof timbers were being sawn through and the slates removed from over his head. Henceforth, he had not even a stone to shelter under, he would wander through the countryside continually, night and day, like a pauper, and if it rained the cold rain would pour down on him, incessantly.

  Chapter 4

  BY five o'clock in the morning the mighty August sun had already risen above the horizon and the ripe wheat of Beauce lay unfolded beneath a fiery sky. Ever since the last summer showers, the expanse of green had turned slowly yellow as it grew taller. Now it had become a radiant golden ocean which seemed to reflect the glowing air, an ocean surging flamelike at the slightest puff of air. Nothing but wheat, with no sign of house or tree; a boundless stretch of wheat. At times beneath the heat a leaden calm would descend on the ears of corn and a heavy scent of fruitfulness rose from the earth. Parturition was near; you could feel the swelling seed, warm and heavy, forcing its way out of the common matrix. And looking at this plain and this gigantic harvest, you felt uneasy lest that minute insect, man, lost in such vastness, might lack the power to complete his task.

  Up at La Borderie, after finishing off his rye, Hourdequin had for the last week been tackling the wheat. Last season, his mechanical harvester had broken down and in desperation at his uncooperative farm-hands, beginning even to have doubts himself as to the efficiency of machines, he had been obliged, as a precaution, to take on a team of harvesters, ever since Ascension Day. In accordance with custom, he had hired them in Mondoubleau, in the Perche: a foreman, a tall gaunt man, five other reapers, and six female gatherers, four women and two girls. They had just come to Cloyes by cart, and his own cart had gone over to pick them up. They were all sleeping in the sheep-pens, empty at this time of the year, the girls, the women and the men all jumbled together in the straw, half naked because of the intense heat.

  This was the hardest time of the year for Jacqueline. Her work went on from sunrise to sunset, for the farm-workers had to show a leg at three o'clock in the morning and crawled back into the straw at about ten o'clock at night. And she had to be first up to prepare their bowl of soup at four o'clock, just as she was last in bed after serving the main meal – bacon, beef and cabbage – at nine o'clock. In between, there were three other meals, bread and cheese for breakfast, another bowl of soup at noon and bread and milk at teatime: five meals in all and big ones at that, washed down with wine and cider, because harvesters work hard and expect to be well fed. But she was always cheerful, as though inspired, her muscles like whipcord, and as lithe as a cat; and her boundless energy was all the more surprising since she was wearing Tron out with her sexual demands, for this tall, rough cowman, colossus though he was, had a soft skin that filled her with uncontrollable lust. She had made a sort of pet of him, taking him along into the barns and the hayloft, as well as into the sheep-pen now that the shepherd, whom she had suspected of spying on her, was sleeping out with his sheep. She had orgies of lust, especially at night, which left her buoyant and alert, and bubbling over with energy. Hourdequin neither saw nor knew anything of all this. He was in the grip of his annual harvest fever, a special fever which was the high point of his passionate love of the land, when he went about trembling inwardly, with t
hrobbing heart and head on fire, moved to the depths of his being by the ripe falling ears of wheat.

  The nights were so scorching hot that year that sometimes Jean was unable to stay in the loft beside the stables where he used to sleep. He would go out and lie down fully dressed on the stone floor of the farmyard. And it was not only the unbearable animal heat of the horses and the smell of their litter which drove him out; it was sleeplessness, with the image of Françoise dancing continually before his eyes, the obsession that she was coming to him and that he was taking her in his arms and smothering her with desire. Now that Jacqueline had other preoccupations and left him alone, his friendly feeling for the young girl had grown into a frenzy of desire. A score of times, lying half-awake in torment, he had sworn to himself that next day he would go down and possess her, and then as soon as he had got up and dipped his head in a bucket of cold water he thought it disgusting, he was too old for her; and the following night he would be tormented again. When the harvesters arrived, he recognized amongst them a woman married to one of the reapers, whom he had tumbled in the hay two years ago, before her marriage. One night he was in such a state that he slipped into the sheep-pen and pulled her out by her feet from between her husband and her brother, who were snoring with their mouths open. She made no resistance. Stealthily, in the stifling darkness, he had greedily slaked his lust on the bare earth that, despite all the raking, still reeked so strongly of ammonia from the sheep who had spent the winter there that his eyes filled with tears. And ever since, for the last twenty days, he had come back every night.

  From the second week of August, the work went ahead. The reapers had started from the fields lying to the north and were working their way down to the ones along the Aigre valley; sheaf by sheaf, the vast expanse of wheat fell beneath the semicircular sweep of the scythes. These tiny insects, submerged in this gigantic labour, were winning the day. Behind their slowly advancing line, the level earth was reappearing under the hard stubble through which the women gatherers were slowly wading, head downwards. It was the time of year when the mournful, lonely plain of Beauce was at its gayest, full of people and enlivened by the constant flow of workers, carts and horses. As far as the eye could see, the teams were working away in the same rhythm, moving along sideways with the same sweep of the arm, sometimes so close to each other that you could hear the hiss of the steel, while others stretched out in long black lines, like trails of ants, right up to the skyline. And in every direction, holes were appearing as in a moth-eaten piece of torn cloth. Strip by strip beneath this antlike activity, Beauce was being bereft of its cloak, the sole adornment of its summer, and left all at once desolate and bare.

  For the last few days, the heat had been overpowering, and on one day in particular, when Jean was carting sheaves near the Buteaus' land into one of the farm's fields where they were going to build a tall stack, some twenty-five feet high and containing three thousand trusses. The stubble was crackling in the drought and, above it, the still ears of wheat as yet uncut, in the burning air, seemed to be glowing with their own flame in the shimmering light of the sun. And not one leaf to offer a touch of cool shade, nothing but the foreshortened shadows of the men on the ground. Since morning, soaked with sweat beneath the fiery sky, Jean had been loading and unloading his cart, without uttering a word but at each trip casting a glance towards the field where Françoise, bent double, was gathering the sheaves behind Buteau who was scything.

  Buteau had had to take on Palmyre to help. Françoise could never have coped by herself and Lise could do little, being eight months pregnant. Buteau was exasperated by this pregnancy. He'd taken so many precautions, too! How the devil did that little brat come to be where he was? He kept bullying his wife, accusing her of having done it deliberately, and would moan for hours, as if some tramp or stray animal had slipped into the house to eat them out of house and home; and after eight months he had reached the stage where he could not bear to look at her belly without insulting her: you and your pudden! How bloody stupid can you get! It'd be the ruination of them. That morning she had come along to help in the binding but he had sent her home in a fury at her ponderous clumsiness. She was to come back with the tea at four o'clock.

  ‘My Christ!’ said Buteau, who was determined to finish one corner of the field. ‘My back's breaking and I'm as dry as a bone.’

  He straightened up; his feet were bare in their big shoes and he was dressed in a shirt and canvas overalls, his shirt open and hanging out, revealing the sweaty hairs on his chest down to his navel.

  ‘I must have another drink!’

  He went and fetched a litre bottle of cider which he had tucked away under his jacket. Then, having taken two gulps of the lukewarm liquid, he thought of the girl.

  ‘Thirsty?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Françoise put the bottle to her lips and took a long draught; she was not squeamish. And as she lent backwards, arching her back, with her breasts pressing hard against her flimsy dress, he watched her. She too was steaming with perspiration in her cotton print dress, half undone, with her bodice unbuttoned at the top showing her white flesh. Under the blue handkerchief protecting her head and neck, her eyes seemed very large, set in her flushed, taciturn face.

  Without adding a word he went back to work, swaying his hips as he cut down a swathe with each stroke of his scythe, the rhythmical swish of steel marking each stride, while she bent over again and followed him, holding the sickle in her right hand to cut off an armful of ears of wheat from amongst the thistles and gathering them up at regular intervals, every three steps, into loose sheaves. When he straightened up just long enough to wipe his brow with the back of his hand and could see that she had fallen too far behind, with her buttocks sticking up in the air and her head level with the ground, in the posture of a female offering herself, he would call out harshly:

  ‘Lazybones! There's no time to waste!’

  In the neighbouring field, where the straw of the sheaves had been drying for the last three days, Palmyre was busy binding them up; nobody was keeping an eye on her because, under the pretext that she was no longer strong, already old and worn out, and so he would be losing money were he to pay her one and a half francs, the normal rate for young women, Buteau had taken her on at so much per hundred sheaves. She had even had to beseech him to hire her services and he had agreed to do it only at a cut-throat wage with the resigned air of a Christian offering charity. The wretched woman would lift three or four loose sheaves, all that her thin arms could hold, and then bind them firmly with a twist of straw which she had made ready. She was completely exhausted by this work of binding, which was so hard that it was normally reserved for men only; the constant heavy load crushed her chest and her arms were tired out by having to hold together so bulky a burden and tie the straw tightly round it. In the morning she had brought along a bottle which she would go and fill up every hour from a filthy stagnant pond near by, and she would drink despite the diarrhoea which was slowly eating away her insides ever since the onset of the heat, weakened as she was already by constant overwork.

  But the blue bowl of the sky had grown pale, as if white-hot; and from it the sun was showering molten embers. It was the oppressive, prostrating hour after lunch, siesta-time. Delhomme and his team, who had been busily building sheaves into straw-hives, four down below and one on top as a roof, had now vanished, all lying down at the bottom of some fold in the ground. For a moment Fouan, who had moved in with his son-in-law, having sold his house a fortnight ago, could still be seen standing up; but then he too had to lie down and could be seen no longer. And against the empty horizon and the background of gleaming stubble there remained only the lean figure of La Grande in the distance examining a tall haystack that her farm-hands had started to build amidst the tiny host of half-made straw-hives. She looked like a tree toughened by age and now impervious to the sun, erect and terrifying with not a bead of perspiration anywhere, and full of wrath towards all these people who were asleep. />
  ‘God, I'm baking,’ said Buteau, and turning towards Françoise he added:

  ‘Let's lie down, shall we?’

  He looked round unsuccessfully for some shade. The sun was beating down pitilessly with not even a bush for shelter anywhere. In the end he noticed at the end of the field, in a sort of small ditch, a narrow brown streak of shade cast by some wheat as yet uncut.

  ‘Hi, Palmyre!’ he called. ‘Are you going to do the same?’

  She was fifty yards away and called back in a voice barely more than a whisper by the time it reached him.

  ‘No, I can't, I haven't got time.’

  She was the only person left working in the whole scorching plain. If she did not take back her one and a half francs that evening, Hilarion would beat her, because not only was he killing her with his brutal love-making but now he was taking her money as well, to get drunk on cheap brandy. But her strength was deserting her at last. Flat as a board, back and front, as though planed down by toil, her body was creaking ready to break each time she picked up a new sheaf. With her ashen face pitted like an old coin, she looked nearly double her thirty-five years, and the burning sun was draining the last few drops of her life in her final despairing effort as she toiled like a beast of burden about to collapse and die.

  Buteau and Françoise had lain down side by side, and now that they were no longer active, lying in sweaty silence with their eyes closed, the steam was rising from their bodies. They immediately fell into a leaden slumber which lasted an hour, with the sweat pouring from every limb in the still, heavy, sweltering heat. When Françoise opened her eyes, she saw Buteau lying on his side watching her with a frown on his face. She closed her eyes and pretended to drop off again. Although he had not yet said anything to her, she sensed that he wanted her, now that he had seen her grow up and turn into a woman. The thought upset her; would that dirty beast really dare when every night she could hear him taking his pleasure with her sister? Never had she felt so irritated by this randy goat. Would he dare? And she lay waiting, wanting him without realizing it and yet ready to strangle him if he were to lay hands on her.