Эмиль Золя
Abbe Mouret's Transgression
VIII
The house with its shutters closed seemed wrapped in slumber as it stood there in the midday sun, amidst the hum of the big flies that swarmed all up the ivy to the roof tiles. The sunlit ruin was steeped in happy quietude. When the doctor had opened the gate of the narrow garden, which was enclosed by a lofty quickset hedge, there, in the shadow cast by a wall, they found Jeanbernat, tall and erect, and calmly smoking his pipe, as in the deep silence he watched his vegetables grow.
‘What, are you up then, you humbug?’ exclaimed the astonished doctor.
‘So you were coming to bury me, were you?’ growled the old man harshly. ‘I don’t want anybody. I bled myself.’
He stopped short as he caught sight of the priest, and assumed so threatening an expression that the doctor hastened to intervene.
‘This is my nephew,’ he said; ‘the new Cure of Les Artaud – a good fellow, too. Devil take it, we haven’t been bowling over the roads at this hour of the day to eat you, Jeanbernat.’
The old man calmed down a little.
‘I don’t want any shavelings here,’ he grumbled. ‘They’re enough to make one croak. Mind, doctor, no priests, and no physics when I go off, or we shall quarrel. Let him come in, however, as he is your nephew.’
Abbe Mouret, struck dumb with amazement, could not speak a word. He stood there in the middle of the path scanning that strange solitaire, with scorched, brick-tinted face, and limbs all withered and twisted like a bundle of ropes, who seemed to bear the burden of his eighty years with a scornful contempt for life. When the doctor attempted to feel his pulse, his ill-humour broke out afresh.
‘Do leave me in peace! I bled myself with my knife, I tell you. It’s all over, now. Who was the fool of a peasant who disturbed you? The doctor here, and the priest as well, why not the mutes too! Well, it can’t be helped, people will be fools. It won’t prevent us from having a drink, eh?’
He fetched a bottle and three glasses, and stood them on an old table which he brought out into the shade. Then, having filled the glasses to the brim, he insisted on clinking them. His anger had given place to jeering cheerfulness.
‘It won’t poison you, Monsieur le Cure,’ he said. ‘A glass of good wine isn’t a sin. Upon my word, however, this is the first time I ever clinked a glass with a cassock, but no offence to you. That poor Abbe Caffin, your predecessor, refused to argue with me. He was afraid.’
Jeanbernat gave vent to a hearty laugh, and then went on: ‘Just fancy, he had pledged himself that he would prove to me that God exists. So, whenever I met him, I defied him to do it; and he sloped off crestfallen, I can tell you.’
‘What, God does not exist!’ cried Abbe Mouret, roused from his silence.
‘Oh! just as you please,’ mockingly replied Jeanbernat. ‘We’ll begin together all over again, if it’s any pleasure to you. But I warn you that I’m a tough hand at it. There are some thousands of books in one of the rooms upstairs, which were rescued from the fire at the Paradou: all the philosophers of the eighteenth century, a whole heap of old books on religion. I’ve learned some fine things from them. I’ve been reading them these twenty years. Marry! you’ll find you’ve got some one who can talk, Monsieur le Cure.’
He had risen, slowly waving his hand towards the surrounding horizon, to the earth and to the sky, and repeating solemnly: ‘There’s nothing, nothing, nothing. When the sun is snuffed out, all will be at an end.’
Doctor Pascal nudged Abbe Mouret with his elbow. With blinking eyes he was curiously observing the old man and nodding approvingly in order to induce him to talk. ‘So you are a materialist, Jeanbernat?’ he said.
‘Oh, I am only a poor man,’ replied the old fellow, relighting his pipe. ‘When Count de Corbiere, whose foster-brother I was, died from a fall from his horse, his children sent me here to look after this park of the Sleeping Beauty, in order to get rid of me. I was sixty years old then, and I thought I was about done. But death forgot me; and I had to make myself a burrow. If one lives all alone, look you, one gets to see things in rather a queer fashion. The trees are no longer trees, the earth puts on the ways of a living being, the stones seem to tell you tales. A parcel of rubbish, eh? But I know some secrets that would fairly stagger you. Besides, what do you think there is to do in this devilish desert? I read the old books; it was more amusing than shooting. The Count, who used to curse like a heathen, was always saying to me: “Jeanbernat, my boy, I fully expect to meet you again in the hot place, so that you will be able to serve me there as you have up here.”’
Once more he waved his hand to the horizon and added: ‘You hear, nothing; there’s nothing. It’s all foolery.’
Dr. Pascal began to laugh.
‘A pleasant piece of foolery, at any rate,’ he said. ‘Jeanbernat, you are a deceiver. I suspect you are in love, in spite of your affectation of being blase. You were speaking very tenderly of the trees and stones just now.’
‘Oh, no, I assure you,’ murmured the old man, ‘I have done with that. At one time, it’s true, when I first knew you and used to go herborising with you, I was stupid enough to love all sorts of things I came across in that huge liar, the country. Fortunately, the old volumes have killed all that. I only wish my garden was smaller; I don’t go out into the road twice a year. You see that bench? That’s where I spend all my time, just watching my lettuces grow.’
‘And what about your rounds in the park?’ broke in the doctor.
‘In the park!’ repeated Jeanbernat, with a look of profound surprise. ‘Why, it’s more than twelve years since I set foot in it! What do you suppose I could do inside that cemetery? It’s too big. It’s stupid, what with those endless trees and moss everywhere and broken statues, and holes in which one might break one’s neck at every step. The last time I went in there, it was so dark under the trees, there was such a stink of wild flowers, and such queer breezes blew along the paths, that I felt almost afraid. So I have shut myself up to prevent the park coming in here. A patch of sunlight, three feet of lettuce before me, and a big hedge shutting out all the view, why, that’s more than enough for happiness. Nothing, that’s what I’d like, nothing at all, something so tiny that nothing from outside could come to disturb me. Seven feet of earth, if you like, just to be able to croak on my back.’
He struck the table with his fist, and suddenly raised his voice to call out to Abbe Mouret: ‘Come, just another glass, your reverence. The old gentleman isn’t at the bottom of the bottle, you know.’
The priest felt ill at ease. To lead back to God that singular old man, whose reason seemed to him to be strangely disordered, appeared a task beyond his powers. He now remembered certain bits of gossip he had heard from La Teuse about the Philosopher, as the peasants of Les Artaud dubbed Jeanbernat. Scraps of scandalous stories vaguely floated in his memory. He rose, making a sign to the doctor that he wished to leave this house, where he seemed to inhale an odour of damnation. But, in spite of his covert fears, a strange feeling of curiosity made him linger. He simply walked to the end of the garden, throwing a searching glance into the vestibule, as if to see beyond it, behind the walls. All he could perceive, however, through the gaping doorway, was the black staircase. So he came back again, and sought for some hole, some glimpse of that sea of foliage which he knew was near by the mighty murmur that broke upon the house, like the sound of waves.
‘And is the little one well?’ asked the doctor, taking up his hat.
‘Pretty well,’ answered Jeanbernat. ‘She’s never here. She often disappears all day long – still, she may be in the upstair rooms.’
He raised his head and called: ‘Albine! Albine!’ Then with a shrug of his shoulders, he added: ‘Yes, my word, she is a nice hussy… Well, till next time, Monsieur le Cure. I’m always at your disposal.’
Abbe Mouret, however, had no time to accept the Philosopher’s challenge. A door suddenly opened at the end of the vestibule; a dazzling breach was made in the black darkness of the wall, and through the breach came a vision of a virgin forest, a great depth of woodland, beneath a flood of sunbeams. In that sudden blaze of light the priest distinctly perceived certain far-away things: a large yellow flower in the middle of a lawn, a sheet of water falling from a lofty rock, a colossal tree filled with a swarm of birds; and all this steeped, lost, blazing in such a tangle of greenery, such riotous luxuriance of vegetation, that the whole horizon seemed one great burst of shooting foliage. The door banged to, and everything vanished.
‘Ah! the jade!’ cried Jeanbernat, ‘she was in the Paradou again!’
Albine was now laughing on the threshold of the vestibule. She wore an orange-coloured skirt, with a large red kerchief fastened round her waist, thus looking like some gipsy in holiday garb. And she went on laughing, her head thrown back, her bosom swelling with mirth, delighted with her flowers, wild flowers which she had plaited into her fair hair, fastened to her neck, her bodice, and her bare slender golden arms. She seemed like a huge nosegay, exhaling a powerful perfume.
‘Ay, you are a beauty!’ growled the old man. ‘You smell of weeds enough to poison one – would any one think she was sixteen, that doll?’
Albine remained unabashed, however, and laughed still more heartily. Doctor Pascal, who was her great friend, let her kiss him.
‘So you are not frightened in the Paradou?’ he asked.
‘Frightened? What of?’ she said, her eyes wide open with astonishment. ‘The walls are too high, no one can get in. There’s only myself. It is my garden, all my very own. A fine big one, too. I haven’t found out where it ends yet.’
‘And the animals?’ interrupted the doctor.
‘The animals? Oh! they don’t hurt; they all know me well.’
‘But it is very dark under the trees?’
‘Course! there’s shade: if there were none, the sun would burn my face up. It is very pleasant in the shade among the leaves.’
She flitted about, filling the little garden with the rustling sweep of her skirts, and scattering round the pungent odour of wild flowers which clung to her. She had smiled at Abbe Mouret without trace of shyness, without heed of the astonished look with which he observed her. The priest had stepped aside. That fair-haired maid, with long oval face, glowing with life, seemed to him to be the weird mysterious offspring of the forest of which he had caught a glimpse in a sheet of sunlight.
‘I say, I have got some blackbird nestlings; would you like them?’ Albine asked the doctor.
‘No, thanks,’ he answered, laughing. ‘You should give them to the Cure’s sister; she is very fond of pets. Good day, Jeanbernat.’
Albine, however, had fastened on the priest.
‘You are the vicar of Les Artaud, aren’t you? You have a sister? I’ll go and see her. Only you must not speak to me about God. My uncle will not have it.’
‘You bother us, be off,’ exclaimed Jeanbernat, shrugging his shoulders. Then bounding away like a goat, dropping a shower of flowers behind her, she disappeared. The slam of a door was heard, and from behind the house came bursts of laughter, which died away in the distance like the scampering rush of some mad animal let loose among the grass.
‘You’ll see, she will end by sleeping in the Paradou,’ muttered the old man with indifference.
And as he saw his visitors off, he added: ‘If you should find me dead one of these fine days, doctor, just do me the favour of pitching me into the muck-pit there, behind my lettuces. Good evening, gentlemen.’
He let the wooden gate which closed the hedge fall to again, and the house assumed once more its aspect of happy peacefulness in the noonday sunlight, amidst the buzzing of the big flies that swarmed all up the ivy even to the roof tiles.
IX
The gig once more rolled along the road skirting the Paradou’s interminable wall. Abbe Mouret, still silent, scanned with upturned eyes the huge boughs which stretched over that wall, like the arms of giants hidden there. All sorts of sounds came from the park: rustling of wings, quivering of leaves, furtive bounds at which branches snapped, mighty sighs that bowed the young shoots – a vast breath of life sweeping over the crests of a nation of trees. At times, as he heard a birdlike note that seemed like a human laugh, the priest turned his head, as if he felt uneasy.
‘A queer girl!’ said his uncle as he eased the reins a little. ‘She was nine years old when she took up her quarters with that old heathen. Some brother of his had ruined himself, though in what I can’t remember. The little one was at school somewhere when her father killed himself. She was even quite a little lady, up to reading, embroidery, chattering, and strumming on the piano. And such a coquette too! I saw her arrive with open-worked stockings, embroidered skirts, frills, cuffs, a heap of finery. Ah, well! the finery didn’t last long!’
He laughed. A big stone nearly upset the gig.
‘It will be lucky if I don’t leave a wheel in this cursed road!’ he muttered. ‘Hold on, my boy.’
The wall still stretched beside them: the priest still listened.
‘As you may well imagine,’ continued the doctor, ‘the Paradou, what with its sun, its stones, and its thistles, would wreck a whole outfit every day. Three or four mouthfuls, that’s all it made of all the little one’s beautiful dresses. She used to come back naked. Now she dresses like a savage. To-day she was rather presentable; but sometimes she has scarcely anything on beyond her shoes and chemise. Did you hear her? The Paradou is hers. The very day after she came she took possession of it. She lives in it; jumps out of the window when Jeanbernat locks the door, bolts off in spite of all, goes nobody knows whither, buries herself in some invisible burrows known only to herself. She must have a fine time in that wilderness.’
‘Hark, uncle!’ interrupted Abbe Mouret. ‘Isn’t that some animal running behind the wall?’
Uncle Pascal listened.
‘No,’ he said after a minute’s silence, ‘it is the rattle of the trap on the stones. No, the child doesn’t play the piano now. I believe she has even forgotten how to read. Just picture to yourself a young lady gone back to a state of primevalness, turned out to play on a desert island. My word, if ever you get to know of a girl who needs proper bringing up, I advise you not to entrust her to Jeanbernat. He has a most primitive way of letting nature alone. When I ventured to speak to him about Albine he answered me that he must not prevent trees from growing as they pleased. He says he is for the normal development of temperaments… All the same, they are very interesting, both of them. I never come this way without paying them a visit.’
The gig was now emerging from the hollowed road. At this point the wall of the Paradou turned and wound along the crest of the hills as far as one could see. As Abbe Mouret turned to take a last look at that grey-hued barrier, whose impenetrable austerity had at last begun to annoy him, a rustling of shaken boughs was heard and a clump of young birch trees seemed to bow in greeting from above the wall.
‘I knew some animal was running behind,’ said the priest.
But, although nobody could be seen, though nothing was visible in the air above save the birches rocking more and more violently, they heard a clear, laughing voice call out: ‘Good-bye, doctor! good-bye, Monsieur le Cure! I am kissing the tree, and the tree is sending you my kisses.’
‘Why! it is Albine,’ exclaimed Doctor Pascal. ‘She must have followed the trap at a run. Jumping over bushes is mere play to her, the little elf!’
And he in his turn shouted out:
‘Good-bye, my pet! How tall you must be to bow like that.’
The laughter grew louder, the birches bowed still lower, scattering their leaves around even on the hood of the gig.
‘I am as tall as the trees; all the leaves that fall are kisses,’ replied the voice now mellowed by distance, so musical, so merged into the rippling whispers of the park, that the young priest was thrilled.
The road grew better. On coming down the slope Les Artaud reappeared in the midst of the scorched plain. When the gig reached the turning to the village, Abbe Mouret would not let his uncle drive him back to the vicarage. He jumped down, saying:
‘No, thanks, I prefer to walk: it will do me good.’
‘Well, just as you like,’ at last answered the doctor. And with a clasp of the hand, he added: ‘Well, if you only had such parishioners as that old brute Jeanbernat, you wouldn’t often be disturbed. However, you yourself wanted to come. And mind you keep well. At the slightest ache, night or day, send for me. You know I attend all the family gratis… There, good-bye, my boy.’
X
Abbe Mouret felt more at ease when he found himself again alone, walking along the dusty road. The stony fields brought him back to his dream of austerity, of an inner life spent in a desert. From the trees all along the sunken road disturbing moisture had fallen on his neck, which now the burning sun was drying. The sight of the lean almond trees, the scanty corn crops, the weak vines, on either side of the way, soothed him, delivered him from the perturbation into which the lusty atmosphere of the Paradou had thrown him. Amid the blinding glare that flowed from heaven over the bare land, Jeanbernat’s blasphemies no longer cast even a shadow. A thrill of pleasure ran through the priest as he raised his head and caught sight of the solitaire’s motionless bar-like silhouette and the pink patch of tiles on the church.
But, as he walked on, fresh anxiety beset the Abbe. La Teuse would give him a fine reception; for his luncheon must have been waiting nearly two hours for him. He pictured her terrible face, the flood of words with which she would greet him, the angry clatter of kitchen ware which he would hear the whole afternoon. When he had got through Les Artaud, his fear became so lively that he hesitated, full of trepidation, and wondered if it would not be better to go round and reach the parsonage by way of the church. But, while he deliberated, La Teuse herself appeared on the doorstep of the parsonage, her cap all awry, and her hands on her hips. With drooping head he had perforce to climb the slope under her storm-laden gaze, which he could feel weighing upon his shoulders.
‘I believe I am rather late, my good Teuse,’ he stammered, as he turned the path’s last bend.
La Teuse waited till he stood quite close before her. She then gave him a furious glance, and, without a word, turned and stalked before him into the dining-room, banging her big heels upon the floor-tiles and so rigid with ire that she hardly limped at all.
‘I have had so many things to do,’ began the priest, scared by this dumb reception. ‘I have been running about all the morning.’
But she cut him short with another look, so fixed, so full of anger, that he felt his legs give way under him. He sat down, and began to eat. She waited on him in the sharp, mechanical manner of an automaton, all but breaking the plates with the violence with which she set them down. The silence became so awful that, choking with emotion, he was unable to swallow his third mouthful.
‘My sister has had her luncheon?’ he asked. ‘Quite right of her. Luncheon should always be served whenever I am kept out.’
No answer came. La Teuse stood there waiting to remove his plate as soon as he should have emptied it. Thereupon, feeling that he could not possibly eat with those implacable eyes crushing him, he pushed his plate away. This angry gesture acted on La Teuse like a whip stroke, rousing her from her obstinate stiffness. She fairly jumped.
‘Ah! that’s how it is!’ she exclaimed. ‘There you are again, losing your temper! Very well, I am off; you can pay my fare, so that I may go back home. I have had enough of Les Artaud, and your church, and everything else!’
She took off her apron with trembling hands.
‘You must have seen that I didn’t wish to say anything to you. A nice life, indeed! Only mountebanks do such things, Monsieur le Cure! This is eleven o’clock, ain’t it! Aren’t you ashamed of sitting at table when it’s almost two o’clock? It’s not like a Christian, no, it is not like a Christian!’
And, taking her stand before him, she went on: ‘Well, where do you come from? whom have you seen? what business can have kept you? If only you were a child you would have the whip. It isn’t the place for a priest to be, on the roads in the blazing sun like a tramp without a roof to put over his head. A fine state you are in, with your shoes all white and your cassock smothered in dust! Who will brush your cassock for you? Who will buy you another one? Speak out, will you; tell me what you have been doing! My word! if everybody didn’t know you, they would end by thinking queer things about you. And shall I tell you? Why, I won’t say but what you may have been up to something wrong. When folks lunch at such hours they are capable of anything!’
Abbe Mouret let the storm blow over him. At the old servant’s wrathful words he experienced a kind of relief.
‘Come, my good Teuse,’ he said, ‘you will first put your apron on again.’
‘No, no,’ she cried, ‘it’s all over, I am going.’
But he got up and, laughing, tied her apron round her waist. She struggled against him and stuttered: ‘I tell you no! You are a wheedler. I can see through your game, I see you want to come it over me with your honeyed words. Where did you go? We’ll see afterwards.’
He gaily sat down to table again like a man who has gained a victory.
‘First, I must be allowed to eat. I am dying with hunger,’ said he.
‘No doubt,’ she murmured, her pity moved. ‘Is there any common sense in it? Would you like me to fry you a couple of eggs? It would not take long. Well, if you have enough. But everything is cold! And I had taken such pains with your aubergines! Nice they are now! They look like old shoe-leather. Luckily you haven’t got a tender tooth like poor Monsieur Caffin. Yes, you have some good points, I don’t deny it.’
Thus chattering, she waited on him with all a mother’s care. After he had finished she ran to the kitchen to see if the coffee was still warm. She frisked about and limped most outrageously in her delight at having made things up with him. As a rule Abbe Mouret fought shy of coffee, which always upset his nervous system; but on this occasion, to ratify the conclusion of peace, he took the cup she brought him. And as he lingered at table she sat down opposite him and repeated gently, like a woman tortured by curiosity:
‘Where have you been, Monsieur le Cure?’
‘Well,’ he answered with a smile, ‘I have seen the Brichets, I have spoken to Bambousse.’
Thereupon he had to relate to her what the Brichets had said, what Bambousse had decided, and how they looked, and where they were at work. When he repeated to her the answer of Rosalie’s father, ‘Of course!’ she exclaimed, ‘if the child should die her mishap would go for nothing.’ And clasping her hands with a look of envious admiration she added, ‘How you must have chattered, your reverence! More than half the day spent to obtain such a fine result! You took it easy coming home? It must have been very hot on the road?’
The Abbe, who by this time had risen, made no answer. He had been on the point of speaking about the Paradou, and asking for some information concerning it. But a fear of being flooded with eager questions, and a kind of vague unavowed shame, made him keep silence respecting his visit to Jeanbernat. He cut all further questions short by asking:
‘Where is my sister? I don’t hear her.’
‘Come along, sir,’ said La Teuse, beginning to laugh, and raising her finger to her lips.
They went into the next room, a country drawing-room, hung with faded wall-paper showing large grey flowers, and furnished with four armchairs and a sofa, covered with horse-hair. On the sofa now slept Desiree, stretched out at full length, with her head resting on her clenched hands. The pronounced curve of her bosom was raised somewhat by her upstretched arms, bare to the elbows. She was breathing somewhat heavily, her red lips parted, and thus showing her teeth.
‘Lord! isn’t she sleeping sound!’ whispered La Teuse. ‘She didn’t even hear you pitching into me just now. Well, she must be precious tired. Just fancy, she was cleaning up her yard till nearly noon. And when she had eaten something, she came and dropped down there like a shot. She has not stirred since.’
For a moment the priest gazed lovingly at her. ‘We must let her have as much rest as she wants,’ he said.
‘Of course. Isn’t it a pity she’s such an innocent? Just look at those big arms! Whenever I dress her I always think what a fine woman she would have made. Ay, she would have brought you some splendid nephews, sir. Don’t you think she is like that stone lady in Plassans corn-market?’
She spoke thus of a Cybele stretched upon sheaves of wheat, the work of one of Puget’s pupils, which was carved on the frontal of the market building. Without replying, however, Abbe Mouret gently pushed her out of the room, and begged her to make as little noise as possible. Till evening, therefore, perfect silence settled on the parsonage. La Teuse finished her washing in the shed. The priest, seated at the bottom of the little garden, his breviary fallen on his lap, remained absorbed in pious thoughts, while all around him rosy petals rained from the blossoming peach-trees.
