The Old Man
The warm autumn sunlight fell across the farmyard through the tall beeches at the roadside. Under the turf cropped by the cows, the earth was soft and moist with recent rain, and sank underfoot with a sound of sucked-in water; the apple trees laden with apples strewed the dark-green herbage with pale-green fruit.
Four young heifers were grazing, tethered in a line; from time to time they lowed towards the house; cocks and hens lent colour and movement to the dungheap in front of the cowshed, running round, cackling noisily, scratching in the dust, while the two cocks crowed without ceasing, looking for worms for their hens, and calling to them with lively clucks.
The wooden gate opened; a man came in, aged perhaps forty, but looking sixty, wrinkled and bent, walking with long strides, weighed down by heavy sabots filled with straw. Arms of abnormal length hung down by the side of his body. As he drew near the farmhouse, a yellow cur, tied to the foot of an enormous pear-tree, beside a barrel which served as his kennel, wagged his tail, and began to bark joyously.
“Down, Finot!” cried the man.
The dog was silent.
A peasant woman came out of the house. Her broad, flat, bony body was plainly visible through a tight-fitting woollen jersey. A grey skirt, too short, reached halfway down her legs, which were hidden in blue stockings; she too wore sabots filled with straw. A yellowing white bonnet covered the sparse hair that clung round her skull, and her face, brown, thin, ugly, toothless, bore the savage and brutalised expression found often in the faces of peasants.
“How is he?” asked the man.
“Parson says it’s the end,” replied the woman; “he won’t last through the night.”
The two of them went into the house.
After passing through the kitchen, they entered a low, dark room, faintly lit by a window, in front of which hung a rag of Norman chintz. Huge beams in the ceiling, brown with age, dark and smoke-begrimed, ran across the room from one side to the other, carrying the light floor of the loft, where crowds of rats ran about both by day and by night.
The earthen floor, damp and uneven, had a greasy look; at the far end of the room the bed was a dim white patch. A hoarse regular sound, a harsh, rattling, and whistling sound, with a gurgling note like that made by a broken pump, came from the darkened couch, where an old man lay dying, the woman’s father.
The man and the woman came up and stared at the dying man with their calm, patient eyes.
“This time, it’s the end,” said the son-in-law; “he won’t even last till nightfall.”
“He’s been gurgling like that since midday,” answered his wife.
Then they were silent. Her father’s eyes were closed, his face was the colour of earth, so dry that it looked as though carved of wood. Between his half-open lips issued a laboured, clamorous breathing, and at every breath the grey calico sheet over his chest heaved and fell.
After a long silence the son-in-law declared:
“There’s nothing to do but leave him to snuff out. There’s nothing we can do. But it’s annoying all the same, because of the colzas; now the weather’s good, I’ll have to transplant them to morrow.”
His wife seemed uneasy at this idea. She pondered for some moments, then said:
“Seeing that he’s going to die, we won’t bury him before Saturday; that will leave you tomorrow for the colza.”
The peasant meditated.
“Yes,” he said, “but then tomorrow I’ll have to bid the guests for the funeral; it’ll take me a good five or six hours to go and see everyone from Tourville to Manetot.”
The woman, after pondering for two or three minutes, declared:
“It’s barely three, so you could start going round tonight and go all over Tourville way. You may as well say he’s dead, seeing that he can’t last through the afternoon.”
For a few moments the man remained in doubt, pondering over the consequences and the advantages of the idea.
“Very well, I’ll go,” he said at last.
He made as though to go out, then came back, and said, after a brief hesitation:
“Seeing that you’ve no work on hand, shake down some cooking-apples, and then you might make four dozen dumplings for the people that will be coming to the funeral; they’ll want cheering up. Light the range with the faggot under the shed by the winepress. It’s dry.”
He left the room, went back into the kitchen, opened the cupboard, took out a six-pound loaf, carefully cut off a slice, gathered the crumbs fallen on to the shelf in the hollow of his hand, and crammed them into his mouth, in order to waste nothing. Then on the tip of his knife he picked up a bit of salt butter from the bottom of a brown earthenware pot and spread it on his bread, which he began to eat slowly, as he did everything.
He went back across the yard, quieted the dog, who began to bark again, went out on to the road which ran alongside his ditch, and departed in the direction of Tourville.
Left alone, the woman set about her task. She took the lid off the flour bin and prepared the paste for the dumplings. For a long time she worked it, turning it over and over, kneading it, squeezing it, and beating it. Then she made a large ball of it, yellowish white in colour, and left it on the corner of the table.
Then she went to get the apples, and, to avoid injuring the tree with a stick, she climbed into it with the aid of a stool. She chose the fruit with care, taking only the ripest, and heaped them in her apron.
A voice called from the road:
“Hey there! Madame Chicot!”
She turned round. It was a neighbour, Master Osime Favet, the mayor, on his way to manure his fields, seated on the manure cart,
