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By Root 1792 0

he had plunged a knife into her heart when he told her that he did not want to see her any more. My God! Why not? Surely she loved him enough? Afraid that he might succumb to his desire to go inside with her, he walked her towards the road and explained as gently as he could that she was compromising him in the eyes of his comrades, that she was endangering the political cause. She was amazed: what on earth had it got to do with politics? Eventually she decided that he must be ashamed of her – not that she was offended, it was perfectly natural – and so she offered to let him slap her in public so as to give the impression that they had broken up. But he would still see her from time to time, just for a little while. She pleaded madly with him, promising to keep out of sight and that she wouldn’t keep him more than five minutes. Étienne was very torn, but continued to refuse. He had to. Then, by way of goodbye, he made to kiss her. Imperceptibly they had reached the first houses in Montsou, and they were standing there with their arms round each other under a broad full moon when a female figure passed them and gave a sudden start as if she had tripped on a stone.

‘Who is it?’ Étienne asked anxiously.

‘It’s Catherine,’ La Mouquette replied. ‘She’s on her way back from Jean-Bart.’

The female figure was now disappearing into the distance, head bowed and dragging her feet as though she were very tired. Étienne watched her go, wretched at the thought of having been seen by her, and his heart heavy with groundless remorse. She had someone of her own, didn’t she? Had she not made him suffer just like this when she had given herself to that man here on this very same Réquillart road? But it made him miserable all the same to think that he had now done the same to her in return.

‘Shall I tell you something?’ La Mouquette murmured tearfully as she left him. ‘The reason you don’t want me is because you’ve got your eye on somebody else.’

Next day the weather was glorious, with a bright frosty sky, one of those fine winter days when the hard earth rings like iron underfoot. By one o’clock Jeanlin had already vanished from the house; but he had to wait for Bébert behind the church, and they very nearly left without Lydie, who had again been locked in the cellar by her mother. She had just been let out and handed a basket with instructions to fill it with dandelion leaves before she came home or else she’d be locked up for the whole night with the rats for company. Terrified, therefore, she wanted to go and pick the salad at once; but Jeanlin talked her out of it. They would see about that later. For a long time now Rasseneur’s large rabbit Poland had been preying on his mind, and just as he was passing the Advantage, the rabbit happened to come out on to the road. In an instant he grabbed it by the ears and stuffed it into Lydie’s basket; and off the three of them dashed. What fun they were going to have making it run like a dog all the way to the forest.

But they stopped to watch Zacharie and Mouquet who, after a beer with two comrades, were just starting their big game of crosse. They were playing for a brand-new cap and a red silk neckerchief, which had been deposited at Rasseneur’s. The four players, playing in pairs, were bidding for the first leg, from Le Voreux to Paillot Farm, a distance of nearly three kilometres; and Zacharie won with a bid of seven strokes against Mouquet’s eight. The cholette, a small boxwood egg, had been placed on the cobbled road sharp end up. Each player had his crosse, a mallet with a slanting iron head and a long handle tightly bound with string. They began at two o’clock precisely. In his first go, a series of three successive strokes, Zacharie hit the cholette a masterly four hundred metres across fields of beet, it being forbidden to play the game in the villages or along the roads on account of the fatal accidents that had occurred. Mouquet, a strong player also, was able to hit the cholette so hard that with a single stroke he drove it a hundred and fifty metres back in the opposite direction.