The Devil
The peasant faced the doctor across the dying woman’s bed. The old woman, calm, resigned, quite conscious, looked at the two men and listened to their words. She was going to die; she made no complaint, her time was come; she was ninety-two years old.
The July sun poured through the window and the open door, its blazing warmth falling over the floor of brown earth, its surface worn into gentle undulating hollows by the sabots of four generations of countrymen. Smells of the fields came borne on the scorching breeze, smells of grass, corn, and leaves burned up in the blaze of the noon. The grasshoppers kept up their ceaseless crying, filling the countryside with a thin crackling noise like the noise of the wooden crickets children buy at fairs.
The doctor, raising his voice, said:
“Honoré, you can’t leave your mother all alone in this state. She will die any moment.”
And the peasant repeated dejectedly:
“But I’ve got to get my corn in: it’s been lying too long. The weather’s just right, I tell you. What d’you say, Mother?”
And the dying old woman, still in the grip of the Norman avarice, said “Yes” with eyes and face, and gave her son leave to get his corn in and to leave her to die alone.
But the doctor grew angry and, stamping his foot, said:
“You’re nothing but a brute, do you hear! And I’ll not let you do it, do you hear that! If you must get your wheat today of all days, go and fetch the Rapet woman, I say, and make her look after your mother. I insist on it, do you hear! And if you don’t obey me, I’ll leave you to die like a dog when it’s your turn to be ill, do you hear?”
The peasant, a tall lean man, slow of gesture, tortured by indecision, between fear of the doctor and the ferocious passion of the miser, hesitated, calculated, and stammered:
“What’ll she want, the Rapet woman, for looking after her?”
“How do I know?” the doctor cried. “It depends on the length of time you want her. Arrange it with her, dammit. But I want her to be here in an hour’s time, do you hear?”
The man made up his mind:
“I’m going, I’m going; don’t get angry, doctor.”
The doctor took himself off, calling:
“Now you know, mind what you’re about, for I don’t play the fool when I’m angry.”
As soon as he was alone, the peasant turned to his mother, and said resignedly:
“I’m going t’get the Rapet woman, seeing t’man says so. Don’t worry yourself while I’m gone.”
And he went out too.
The Rapet woman, an old washerwoman, looked after the dead and dying of the village and the district. Then, as soon as she had seen her clients into the sheet which they can never throw off, she went home and took up the iron with which she smoothed the garments of the living. Wrinkled like a last year’s apple, malicious, jealous, greedy with a greed passing belief, bent in two as if her loins had been broken by the ceaseless movement of the iron she pushed over the clothes, one might have thought she had a monstrous cynical love for agony. She never talked of anything but the persons she had seen die and of all the manner of deaths at which she had been present, and she talked about them with a wealth of minute and identical details as a hunter talks about his bags.
When Honoré Bontemps entered her house he found her getting blue water ready for the village women’s handkerchiefs.
“Well, good evening,” he said. “You all right, Mrs. Rapet?”
She turned her head to look at him:
“Same as always, same as always. What about you?”
“Oh, I’m getting on fine, I am, but Mother’s not.”
“Your mother?”
“Yes, my mother.”
“What’s the matter with your mother?”
“She’s going to turn her toes up, she is.”
The old woman drew her hands out of the water: bluish transparent drops rolled to the tips of her fingers and fell back into the bucket.
She asked with a sudden sympathy:
“She’s as bad as that, is she?”
“T’doctor says she’ll not last through the afternoon.”
“She must be bad, then.”
Honoré hesitated. He considered various ways of approaching the proposal he meditated. But, finding none of them satisfactory, he broke out suddenly:
“How much d’you want to look after her for me until she’s gone? You know I’m not rich. I can’t even pay for so much as a servant. That’s what has brought her to this pass, my poor mother, overmuch worrying, overmuch hard work. She worked like ten men, in spite of her ninety-two years. They don’t make ’em like that now.”
La Rapet replied gravely: “I’ve two charges, forty sous a day and three francs a night to the rich; twenty sous a day and forty a night to t’others. You can give me twenty and forty.”
But the peasant reflected. He knew his mother too well. He knew that she was tenacious of life, vigorous, and sprung of hard stock. She might last eight days in spite of the doctor’s opinion.
He spoke resolutely:
“No. I’d rather you had a sum down,
