He remained crouching under the dike for more than an hour, even after she had gone. He went away again with her image more firmly fixed in his mind than ever.
For a month his mind was filled with thoughts of her, he shivered when she was spoken of in his presence. He could not eat, and every night he sweated so that he could not sleep.
On Sunday at Mass, his eyes never left her. She noticed it, and smiled at him, flattered by his admiration.
But one evening he came upon her unexpectedly in a road. She stopped when she saw him coming. Then he walked right up to her, choking with nervousness and a passion of desire, but determined to speak to her. He began, stuttering:
“Look here, my lass, this can’t go on like this.”
Her reply sounded as if she were making fun of him:
“What is it that can’t go on, Benoist?”
He answered:
“That I think about you as often as there are hours in the day.”
She rested her hands on her hips:
“I’m not making you do it.”
He stammered:
“Yes, you are: I can’t sleep, or rest, or eat, or anything.”
She said softly:
“Well, and what would cure you?”
He stood paralysed, his arms dangling, his eyes round, his mouth hanging open.
She poked him violently in the stomach, and fled, running.
After this day, they met again by the dikes, in the sunken roads, or more often at dusk on the edge of a field, when he was coming home with his goats and she was driving the cows back to their shed.
He felt himself urged, driven towards her by a wild desire of heart and body. He would have liked to crush her, strangle her, devour her, absorb her into himself. And he trembled with impotent impatient rage because she was not his completely, as if they had been one and indivisible.
People were talking about them. They were said to be betrothed. He had, moreover, asked her if she would be his wife, and she had answered him: “Yes.” They were waiting an opportunity to speak to their parents.
Then, without warning, she stopped coming to meet him at the usual hour. He did not even see her when he prowled round the farm. He could not catch a glimpse of her at Mass on Sundays. And it was on a Sunday, after the sermon, that the priest announced in the pulpit that he published the banns of marriage between Victoire-Adélaïde Martin and Josephin-Isidore Vallin.
Benoist felt a strange emotion in his hands, as though the blood had run out of them. His ears sang; he heard nothing more, and after a time he realised that he was crying in his missal.
He kept his room for a month. Then he began working again.
But he was not cured and he thought about it continually. He avoided walking along the roads that ran past the house where she lived, so that he should not see even the trees in the yard: it necessitated a wide detour, which he made morning and evening.
She had now married Vallin, the wealthiest farmer in the district. Benoist and he no longer spoke, although they had been friends since childhood.
But one evening, as Benoist was on his way past the town hall, he heard that she was pregnant. Instead of bitter suffering, the knowledge brought him, on the contrary, something like relief. It was finished now, absolutely finished. This divided them more utterly than her marriage. Assuredly he preferred it so.
Months passed, and more months. He caught occasional glimpses of her going about the village with her burdened gait. She turned red when she saw him, hung her head and quickened her step. And he turned out of his way to avoid crossing her path and meeting her eye.
But he thought wretchedly that the day would inevitably come when he would find himself face to face with her, and be compelled to speak to her. What should he say to her now, after all he had said to her in other days, holding her hands and kissing the hair falling round her cheeks? He still thought often of their dike-side trysts. It was a wicked thing she had done, after all her promises.
Little by little, however, his heart forgot its pain; only a gentle melancholy lingered in it. And one day, for the first time, he took again his old road past the farm where she lived. He saw the roof of her house long before he drew near. It was under this very roof that she was living with another. The apple trees were in bloom, the cocks crowing on the dunghill. There did not seem to be a soul in the house, since everyone was in the fields, hard at work on the tasks spring brought. He halted near the fence and looked into the yard. The dog was asleep in front of his kennel, three calves were going slowly, one after another, towards the pond. A plump turkey was strutting before the door, showing off before the hens with the air of an operatic star.
Benoist leaned against the post: a sudden violent desire to cry had seized him again. But all at once he heard a cry, a cry for help. It came from the house. He stood a moment bewildered, his hands gripping the wooden bar, listening, listening. Another cry, a long-drawn agonised cry, thrust through ears and mind and flesh. It was she crying like this. He leaped forward, crossed the grass, pushed open the door and saw her stretched on the floor, writhing, with livid and haggard eyes, taken by the pangs of childbirth.
He stood there, then, pale and more violently trembling than she, stammering:
“Here I am, here I am, my lass.”
Gasping, she answered:
“Oh, don’t leave me, don’t leave me, Benoist.”
He stared at her, not knowing what else to say or do. Her cries began again:
“Oh! oh! it tears me! Oh! Benoist!”
And she twisted herself in an agony of pain.
All at once, Benoist was overwhelmed by a
