Complete Works of Emile Zola (801 page)

‘You know quite well why I won’t have you coming here,’ Pauline replied. ‘When you behave differently, I will see what I can do for you.’

Thereupon the young fellow began to plead his cause in a whining voice: ‘It is all her fault; she brought it about. She would have gone on beating me otherwise. Please give us a trifle, kind young lady. We have lost everything. I could get on well enough myself, but it is for her that I’m asking you, and she is very ill — indeed she is; I swear it.’

Pauline ended by taking pity on him and sending him away with a loaf of bread and some stew; and she even promised to call on the sick woman and take her some medicine.

‘Medicine, indeed!’ muttered Chanteau. ‘Just you try to get her to swallow it!’

But Pauline had already turned her attention to the Prouane girl, one of whose cheeks was gashed.

‘How have you managed to do that?’

‘I fell against a tree, Mademoiselle Pauline.’

‘Against a tree? It looks more like a cut from the corner of a table.’

She was a big girl now, with prominent cheek-bones, but she still had the great haggard eyes of a weak-witted child, and she made vain efforts to remain standing in a respectful attitude. Her legs shook under her, and she could scarcely articulate her words.

‘Why! you have been drinking, you wicked girl!’ cried Pauline, scrutinizing her keenly.

‘Oh, Mademoiselle! how can you say so?’

‘You were drunk and you fell down! Isn’t it so? I know very well what you are all given to. Sit down, and I will go and get some arnica and a bandage.’

She attended to the girl’s cheek, and tried to make her feel ashamed of herself. It was disgraceful, she told her, for a girl of her age to intoxicate herself with her father and mother, a couple of drunkards who would be found dead some morning, poisoned by calvados. The girl listened drowsily, and when her cheek was bandaged she stammered out:

‘Father is always complaining of pains, and I could rub him well if you would give me a little camphorated brandy.’

Neither Pauline nor Chanteau could keep from laughing.

‘No, no! I know very well what would become of the brandy. I will give you a loaf, though I’m afraid you will go and sell it and spend the money in drink. Stay where you are, and Cuche shall take you home.’

Young Cuche got up from the bench in his turn. His feet were bare; indeed, the only clothes he wore were some old breeches and a ragged shirt, through which showed parts of his skin, browned by the sun and torn by brambles. He was to be met running about the high-roads, leaping over hedges with the agility of a wolf, living like a savage, to whom hunger makes every sort of prey acceptable. He had reached the lowest depths of misery and destitution, such an abyss of wretchedness that Pauline looked at him with remorse, as though she felt guilty for allowing a human being to go on living in such a state. But whenever she had attempted to rescue him, he had always fled, hating all thought of work or service.

‘Since you have come here again,’ she said to him gently, ‘I suppose you have thought over what I said to you last Saturday. I hope that your return here is a sign that you are not lost to all sense of what is right. You cannot go on leading your present vagabond life; I am no longer as rich as I was, and I cannot support you in idleness. Have you made up your mind to accept my offer?’

Since the loss of her fortune Pauline had tried to make up for her lack of money by interesting other charitable people in her pensioners. Doctor Cazenove had at last suc­ceeded in obtaining the admission of Cuche’s mother into the hospital for incurables at Bayeux, and Pauline herself held in reserve a sum of one hundred francs to provide an outfit for the son, for whom she had found a berth among the workmen employed on the railway line to Cherbourg. He bent his head as she spoke, and listened to her with an expression of distrust.

‘It’s quite settled, isn’t it ‘?’ she continued. ‘You will accompany your mother, and then you will go to your post.’

But as she stepped towards him he sprang back. His eyes, though downcast, never left her, and he seemed to think that she was going to seize him by his wrists.

‘What is the matter?’ she asked in surprise.

Then, with a wild animal’s uneasy glance, the lad mur­mured: ‘You are going to take me and shut me up. I don’t want to go.’

All further attempts at persuasion were useless. He let her continue talking, and appeared to admit the force of her reasoning; but as soon as ever she moved he sprang towards the gate, and with an obstinate shake of the head refused her offers for his mother and for himself, preferring freedom and starvation.

‘Take yourself off, you lazy impostor!’ Chanteau cried at last in indignation. ‘It is kindness thrown away, troubling one’s self about such a vagabond.’

Pauline’s hands trembled as she thought of her wasted charity, her failure to effect anything for this lad, who insisted on remaining in misery.

‘No, no! uncle,’ she said, with an expression of despairing tolerance, ‘they are starving, and they must have some food in spite of everything.’

She called Cuche back to her to give him, as on other Saturdays, a loaf of bread and forty sous. But he backed away from her, saying:

‘Put it down on the ground and go away, and I will come and pick it up.’

She did as he told her. Then he cautiously stepped forward, casting suspicious glances around him. As soon as he had picked up the forty sous and the loaf he ran off as fast as his bare feet could carry him.

‘The wild beast!’ cried Chanteau. ‘He will come and murder us all one of these nights. It’s just like that little gaol-bird’s daughter there. I would swear it was she who stole my silk handkerchief the other day.’

He was speaking of the Tourmal girl, whose grandfather had lately joined her father in gaol. She was now the only one who was left on the bench with the little Prouane, who was stupefied with drink. She got up, without any sign that she had heard the charge of theft brought against her, and she began to whine: ‘Have pity upon us, kind young lady! There is nobody but mother and me at home now. The gendarmes come and beat us every night. My body is all one big bruise, and mother is dying. Oh! kind young lady, do give us some money and some good meat-soup and some wine—’

Chanteau, quite exasperated by the girl’s string of lies, moved restlessly in his chair, but Pauline would have given the chemise off her back.

‘There! there! That will do,’ she muttered. ‘You would get more if you talked less. Stay where you are, and I will make up a basket for you.’

When she came back, bringing with her an old fish-hamper, in which she had put a loaf, two litre-bottles of wine, and some meat, she found another of her pensioners on the terrace, the Gonin girl, who had brought her child with her, a girl now some twenty months old. The mother, who was sixteen years of age, was so fragile and slight of figure that she seemed more like the child’s elder sister. She was scarcely able to carry the infant, but she nevertheless brought it to the house, as she knew that Mademoiselle Pauline was very fond of children and could refuse them nothing.

‘Good gracious! How heavy she is!’ cried Pauline, as she took the child in her arms. ‘And to think that she is not six months older than our Paul!’

Despite herself, her eyes turned sadly towards the little boy, who was still lying asleep upon the rug. However, the young mother began to complain:

‘If you only knew how much she eats, Mademoiselle Pauline! And I’ve no bed-linen, and nothing to dress her with. And then, since father is dead, mother and the other one are always ill-using me. They treat me like the lowest of the low, and say that if I have a baby I ought to provide what it costs to keep it.’

‘Poor little thing!’ Pauline murmured. ‘I am knitting her some socks. You must bring her to see me oftener; there is always milk here, and she might have a few spoon­fuls of gruel. I will go and see your mother, and I’ll try to frighten her, as she still behaves unkindly to you.’

The girl took up her daughter again, while Pauline began to prepare a parcel.

However, Abbé Horteur now appeared upon the terrace.

‘Here come Monsieur Lazare and the Doctor,’ he announced.

At the same moment they heard the wheels of the gig, and while Martin, the ex-sailor with the wooden leg, was leading the horse to the stable, Cazenove came round from the yard, crying:

‘I am bringing you back the rake who stopped away from home all night. You won’t be very hard on him, I hope!’

Lazare now appeared, smiling feebly. He was quickly ageing; his shoulders were bent and his face was cadaverous, devastated by the mental anguish which was destroying him. He was no doubt on the point of explaining the reason of his delay when the window of the first floor, which had remained open, was violently closed.

‘Louise hasn’t quite finished dressing yet,’ Pauline explained. ‘She will be down in a minute or two.’

They all looked at one another, and there was a feeling of embarrassment. That angry banging of the window portended a quarrel. After taking a step or two towards the stairs, Lazare checked himself and determined to wait where he was. He kissed his father and little Paul; and then, to conceal his disquietude, he tackled his cousin, saying to her in a querulous voice:

‘Bid us of all this vermin! You know I can’t bear to see them anywhere near me.’

He was referring to the three girls who were still on the bench. Pauline hastened to tie up the parcel which she had made for the Gonin girl.

‘There! you can go now,’ she said. ‘You two just take your companion home, and mind she doesn’t fall any more. And, you, look well after your baby, and try not to forget it or leave it anywhere on the road.’

As they were at last setting off Lazare insisted upon examining the Tourmal girl’s hamper. She had already contrived to stow away in it an old coffee-pot, which had been thrown aside in a corner and which she had managed to steal. Then all three of the little hussies were driven away, the young drunkard tottering along between the two others.

‘What a dreadful lot they are!’ exclaimed the priest, sitting down by Chanteau’s side. ‘God has certainly abandoned them. Some have children directly after their first Communion, and others take to drinking and thieving like their parents. Ah, well! I’ve warned them of what will happen to them some day!’

‘I say, my dear fellow,’ then began the Doctor, addressing Lazare in an ironical tone, ‘are you thinking of building those famous stockades of yours over again?’

Lazare made an angry gesture. Any allusion to his defeat in his struggle with the sea exasperated him.

‘No indeed!’ he cried. ‘I would let the sea sweep into our own house, without even putting a broom-handle across the road to stay its course. No, no! indeed. I’ve been very foolish as it is, but one doesn’t commit that kind of folly again. I actually saw those scoundrels dancing with delight on the day of the catastrophe! Do you know what I begin to think? I feel sure they had sawn through the beams on the day before the flood-tide, for they would never have given way as they did if they had not been tampered with.’

He tried in this way to salve his wounded pride as an engineer. Then, stretching his hand towards Bonneville, he added:

‘Let them all go to smash! I will take my turn at dancing then!’

‘Don’t say such wicked things!’ Pauline observed in her quiet manner.
‘
Only the poor may be excused for being wicked. You ought to build up the stockade again in spite of everything.’

Lazare had already calmed down, as though his last burst of passion had exhausted him.

‘No, no!’ he muttered, ‘it would bore me too much. But you are right; there is nothing for one to make oneself angry about. Whether they’re drowned or not, what does it matter to me?’

Silence fell again. Chanteau had fallen back into a posture of dolorous immobility after raising his head to receive his son’s kiss. The priest was twirling his thumbs, and the Doctor paced about, with his hands behind his back. They all began to look at little Paul, whom Pauline defended even from his father’s caresses, to prevent him from being wakened. Since the others had come she had begged them to lower their voices and not to tread so heavily about the rug, and she now shook a whip at Loulou, who still continued to growl at the noise he had heard when the horse was led to the stable.

‘You don’t suppose that that will quiet him, do you?’ said Lazare. ‘He’ll make that row for an hour. He’s the most disagreeable brute I ever came across. He begins to snarl directly one moves, and one might as well be without a dog at all, he is so completely absorbed in himself. The only good the sulky beast does is to make us regret our poor old Matthew.’

‘How old is Minouche now?’ Cazenove inquired. ‘I have seen her about here as long as I can remember.’

‘She is turned sixteen,’ Pauline answered, ‘and she keeps very well yet.’

Minouche, who was still at her toilet on the dining-room window-sill, raised her head as the Doctor pronounced her name. For a moment she held her foot suspended in the air, then again began to lick her fur delicately.

‘She isn’t deaf yet, you see,’ Pauline said; ‘but I fancy her sight is not so good as it was. It is scarcely a week ago since seven kittens of hers were drowned. It is really quite terrible to think of the number she has had during the last sixteen years. If they had all been allowed to live they would have eaten up the whole neighbourhood.’

‘Well, well, she at any rate keeps neat and clean,’ said the priest, glancing at Minouche as she continued washing herself with her tongue.

Chanteau, who, like the others, was looking towards the cat, now began to moan more loudly with that incessant involuntary expression of pain which had become so habitual to him that he had grown unconscious of it.

‘Are you feeling worse?’ the Doctor asked him.

‘Eh? What? Why do you ask?’ he said, suddenly seeming to awake. ‘Ah, it’s because I’m breathing heavily. Yes, I am in great pain this evening. I thought that the sun would do me good, but I feel as though I were being suffocated, and I haven’t a joint that isn’t burning.’