The Debacle - Emile Zola [230]
‘Prussian swine!’
His mother snatched him up in her arms and sat him on her lap. Poor little thing, her joy and her despair, whom she loved with all her soul but could never look at without crying, this child of her body it hurt so much to hear maliciously being called the Prussian by the kids of his age when they played with him in the street. She kissed him as though to force the words back into his mouth.
‘Who taught you those wicked words? It’s naughty, you mustn’t say them, my pet.’
So of course with the obstinacy of children Chariot went into a fit of giggles and immediately started again:
‘Prussian swine!’
Then, seeing his mother burst into tears, he began crying too and threw his arms round her neck. Oh God, what fresh misfortune was threatening? Wasn’t it enough to have lost in Honoré the only hope in her life, the certainty of forgetting and being happy again? No, the other man had to come back to complete her misery.
‘Now, now, come to bye-byes, my pettikins… I love you just the same, for you don’t understand how sad you make me.’
So as not to embarrass her by looking at her, Prosper had made a point of carefully going on with carving his whip-handle. She left him alone for a minute.
But before putting Chariot to bed Silvine usually took him to say good night to Jean, with whom the child was great friends. That evening as she went in, holding the candle in her hand, she saw the invalid sitting up in bed, staring into the darkness. So he wasn’t asleep? Oh no, he was turning all sorts of things over in his mind, alone in the silent winter night. While she filled up the stove he played for a minute with Charlot, who rolled on the bed like a kitten. He knew Silvine’s story and he was fond of this brave, quiet girl who had been through so much, mourning the one man she had loved and having only the one consolation left of this poor child, whose birth was her lasting torment. And so, when she had shut down the stove and came over to take the child out of his arms, he noticed that her eyes were red with crying. What, had somebody given her more trouble? But she did not want to tell him – she might later on if there was any point. After all, wasn’t life a continual sorrow for her?
Silvine was taking Chariot away when there was a noise of footsteps and voices in the yard. Jean listened in surprise.
‘What’s up, then? That’s not old Fouchard coming in, I didn’t hear the wheels of his cart.’
In his isolated room he had developed an awareness of the regular life of the farm, and was familiar with the slightest sounds. He listened and then said at once:
‘Oh yes, it’s those men, the guerrillas of the Dieulet woods, coming for provisions.’
‘Quick!’ said Silvine, running off and leaving him in darkness once again. ‘I must run and give them their loaves.’
By now fists were banging on the kitchen door and Prosper, worried because he was on his own, was gaining time by arguing. When the master was not at home he was not keen on opening the door for fear of damage for which he would be held responsible. But he was fortunate in that just then old Fouchard’s trap came down the hill, the sound of the horse’s feet muffled in the snow. So it was the old man who let them in.
‘Oh good, so it’s you three… What have you got for me in that barrow?’
Sambuc, looking like an emaciated bandit buried in a blue woolly too big for him, didn’t even hear, being furious with Prosper, his gentleman brother as he called him, who was only then making up his mind to open the door.
‘Look here, you, do you take us for beggars, leaving us out here in weather like this?’
But while Prosper, quite unruffled, silently shrugged his shoulders and got on with stabling the trap and horse, old Fouchard broke in again, stooping over the barrow.
‘So you’ve brought me two dead sheep. Good job it’s freezing, otherwise they wouldn’t smell too good!’
Cabasse and Ducat, Sambuc’s two lieutenants, who always went with him on his expeditions, expostulated: