The Complete Works: Short Stories, Novels, Plays, Poetry, Memoirs and more. Guy de MaupassantЧитать онлайн книгу.
for idleness and sin. She kept getting up every moment to fetch the dishes or fill the glasses with cider, sharp and yellow from the decanter, or sweet, red, and frothing from the bottles, the corks of which popped like those of ginger beer.
Madeleine scarcely ate or spoke. She wore her wonted smile upon her lips, but it was a sad and resigned one. She was downcast. Why? She had wanted to come. She had not been unaware that she was going among country folk — poor country folk. What had she fancied them to be — she, who did not usually dream? Did she know herself? Do not women always hope for something that is not? Had she fancied them more poetical? No; but perhaps better informed, more noble, more affectionate, more ornamental. Yet she did not want them high-bred, like those in novels. Whence came it, then, that they shocked her by a thousand trifling, imperceptible details, by a thousand indefinable coarsenesses, by their very nature as rustics, by their words, their gestures, and their mirth? She recalled her own mother, of whom she never spoke to anyone — a governess, brought up at Saint Denis — seduced, and died from poverty and grief when she, Madeleine, was twelve years old. An unknown hand had had her brought up. Her father, no doubt. Who was he? She did not exactly know, although she had vague suspicions.
The lunch still dragged on. Customers were now coming in and shaking hands with the father, uttering exclamations of wonderment on seeing his son, and slyly winking as they scanned the young wife out of the corner of their eye, which was as much as to say: “Hang it all, she’s not a duffer, George Duroy’s wife.” Others, less intimate, sat down at the wooden tables, calling for “A pot,” “A jugful,” “Two brandies,” “A raspail,” and began to play at dominoes, noisily rattling the little bits of black and white bone. Mother Duroy kept passing to and fro, serving the customers, with her melancholy air, taking money, and wiping the tables with the corner of her blue apron.
The smoke of clay pipes and sou cigars filled the room. Madeleine began to cough, and said: “Suppose we go out; I cannot stand it.”
They had not quite finished, and old Duroy was annoyed at this. Then she got up and went and sat on a chair outside the door, while her father-in-law and her husband were finishing their coffee and their nip of brandy.
George soon rejoined her. “Shall we stroll down as far as the Seine?” said he.
She consented with pleasure, saying: “Oh, yes; let us go.”
They descended the slope, hired a boat at Croisset, and passed the rest of the afternoon drowsily moored under the willows alongside an island, soothed to slumber by the soft spring weather, and rocked by the wavelets of the river. Then they went back at nightfall.
The evening’s repast, eaten by the light of a tallow candle, was still more painful for Madeleine than that of the morning. Father Duroy, who was half drunk, no longer spoke. The mother maintained her dogged manner. The wretched light cast upon the gray walls the shadows of heads with enormous noses and exaggerated movements. A great hand was seen to raise a pitchfork to a mouth opening like a dragon’s maw whenever any one of them, turning a little, presented a profile to the yellow, flickering flame.
As soon as dinner was over, Madeleine drew her husband out of the house, in order not to stay in this gloomy room, always reeking with an acrid smell of old pipes and spilt liquor. As soon as they were outside, he said: “You are tired of it already.”
She began to protest, but he stopped her, saying: “No, I saw it very plainly. If you like, we will leave tomorrow.”
“Very well,” she murmured.
They strolled gently onward. It was a mild night, the deep, all-embracing shadow of which seemed filled with faint murmurings, rustlings, and breathings. They had entered a narrow path, overshadowed by tall trees, and running between two belts of underwood of impenetrable blackness.
“Where are we?” asked she.
“In the forest,” he replied.
“Is it a large one?”
“Very large; one of the largest in France.”
An odor of earth, trees, and moss — that fresh yet old scent of the woods, made up of the sap of bursting buds and the dead and moldering foliage of the thickets, seemed to linger in the path. Raising her head, Madeleine could see the stars through the tree-tops; and although no breeze stirred the boughs, she could yet feel around her the vague quivering of this ocean of leaves. A strange thrill shot through her soul and fleeted across her skin — a strange pain gripped her at the heart. Why, she did not understand. But it seemed to her that she was lost, engulfed, surrounded by perils, abandoned by everyone; alone, alone in the world beneath this living vault quivering there above her.
She murmured: “I am rather frightened. I should like to go back.”
“Well, let us do so.”
“And — we will leave for Paris tomorrow?”
“Yes, tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow morning?”
“Tomorrow morning, if you like.”
They returned home. The old folks had gone to bed. She slept badly, continually aroused by all the country sounds so new to her — the cry of the screech owl, the grunting of a pig in a sty adjoining the house, and the noise of a cock who kept on crowing from midnight. She was up and ready to start at daybreak.
When George announced to his parents that he was going back they were both astonished; then they understood the origin of his wish.
The father merely said: “Shall I see you again soon?”
“Yes, in the course of the summer.”
“So much the better.”
The old woman growled: “I hope you won’t regret what you have done.”
He left them two hundred francs as a present to assuage their discontent, and the carriage, which a boy had been sent in quest of, having made its appearance at about ten o’clock, the newly-married couple embraced the old country folk and started off once more.
As they were descending the hill Duroy began to laugh.
“There,” he said, “I had warned you. I ought not to have introduced you to Monsieur and Madame du Roy de Cantel, Senior.”
She began to laugh, too, and replied: “I am delighted now. They are good folk, whom I am beginning to like very well. I will send them some presents from Paris.” Then she murmured: “Du Roy de Cantel, you will see that no one will be astonished at the terms of the notification of our marriage. We will say that we have been staying for a week with your parents on their estate.” And bending towards him she kissed the tip of his moustache, saying: “Good morning, George.”
He replied: “Good morning, Made,” as he passed an arm around her waist.
In the valley below they could see the broad river like a ribbon of silver unrolled beneath the morning sun, the factory chimneys belching forth their clouds of smoke into the sky, and the pointed spires rising above the old town.
French
X
The Du Roys had been back in Paris a couple of days, and the journalist had taken up his old work pending the moment when he should definitely assume Forestier’s duties, and give himself wholly up to politics. He was going home that evening to his predecessor’s abode to dinner, with a light heart and a keen desire to embrace his wife, whose physical attractions and imperceptible domination exercised a powerful impulse over him. Passing by a florist’s at the bottom of the Rue Notre Dame de Lorette, he was struck by the notion of buying a bouquet for Madeleine, and chose a large bunch of half-open roses, a very bundle of perfumed buds.
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