It issued from his mouth, now like cannon-shots, terrible and short, now like thunderclaps that rolled for five minutes, such a tempest of oaths that he seemed to have in his lungs all the storms of the Eternal Father.
Then, when he had left his boat, and was face to face with her in the middle of a crowd of curious spectators and fishwives, he fished up again from the bottom of the hold a fresh cargo of insults and hard words, and escorted her in such fashion to their home, she in front, he behind, she weeping, he shouting.
Then, alone with her, doors shut, he came to blows on the least pretext. Anything was enough to make him lift his hand, and once he had begun, he never stopped, spitting in her face, all the time, the real causes of his hate. At each blow, at each thump, he yelled: “Oh, you penniless slut, oh, you guttersnipe, oh, you miserable starveling, I did a fine thing the day I washed my mouth out with the firewater of your scoundrel of a father.”
She passed her days now, poor woman, in a state of incessant terror, in a continuous trembling of soul and of body, in stunned expectation of insults and thrashings.
And this lasted for ten years. She was so broken that she turned pale when she was talking to anyone, no matter who, and no longer thought of anything but the beatings that threatened her, and she had grown as skinny, yellow and dried up as a smoked fish.
II
One night when her man was at sea she was awakened by the noise like the growling of a beast which the wind makes when it gets up, like an unleashed hound. She sat up in bed, uneasy, then, hearing nothing more, lay down again; but almost at once, there was a moaning in the chimney that shook the whole house and ran across the whole sky as if a pack of furious animals had crossed the empty spaces, panting and bellowing.
Then she got up and ran to the harbour. Other women were running from all sides with lanterns. Men came running and everyone was watching the foam flashing white in the darkness on the crest of the waves out at sea.
The storm lasted fifteen hours. Eleven sailors returned no more, and Patin was among them.
The wreckage of his boat, the Jeune-Amélie, was recovered off Dieppe. Near Saint-Valéry, they picked up the bodies of his sailors, but his body was never found. As the hull of the small craft had been cut in two, his wife for a long time expected and dreaded his return; for if there had been a collision, it might have happened that the colliding vessel had taken him on board, and carried him to a distant country.
Then, slowly, she grew used to the thought that she was a widow, even though she trembled every time that a neighbour or a beggar or a tramping pedlar entered her house abruptly.
Then, one afternoon, almost four years after the disappearance of her man, she stopped, on her way along the Rue aux Juifs, before the house of an old captain who had died recently and whose belongings were being sold.
Just at this moment, they were auctioning a parrot, a green parrot with a blue head, which was regarding the crowd with a discontented and uneasy air.
“Three francs,” cried the seller, “a bird that talks like a lawyer, three francs.”
A friend of widow Patin jogged her elbow.
“You ought to buy that, you being rich,” she said. “It would be company for you; he is worth more than thirty francs, that bird. You can always sell him again for twenty to twenty-five easy.”
“Four francs, ladies, four francs,” the man repeated. “He sings vespers and preaches like the priest. He’s a phenomenon … a miracle!”
Widow Patin raised the bid by fifty centimes, and they handed her the hook-nosed creature in a little cage and she carried him off.
Then she installed him in her house, and as she was opening the iron-wire door to give the creature a drink, she got a bite on the finger that broke the skin and drew blood.
“Oh, the wicked bird,” said she.
However, she presented him with hemp-seed and maize, then left him smoothing his feathers while he peered with a malicious air at his new home and his new mistress.
Next morning day was beginning to break, when widow Patin heard, with great distinctness, a loud, resonant, rolling voice, the voice of Patin, which shouted:
“Get up, slut.”
Her terror was such that she hid her head under the bedclothes, for every morning, in the old days, as soon as he had opened his eyes, her dead husband shouted in her ears those three words that she knew well.
Trembling, huddled into a ball, her back turned to the thrashing that she was momentarily expecting, she murmured, her face hidden in the bed:
“God Almighty, he’s here! God Almighty, he’s here! He’s come back, God Almighty!”
Minutes passed; no other sound broke the silence of her room. Then, shuddering, she lifted her head from the bed, sure that he was there, spying on her, ready to strike.
She saw nothing, nothing but a ray of sun falling across the windowpane, and she thought:
“He’s hiding, for sure.”
She waited a long time, then, a little reassured, thought:
“I must have been dreaming, seeing he doesn’t show himself.”
She was shutting her eyes again, a little reassured, when right in her ears the furious voice burst out, the thunderous voice of her drowned man, shouting:
“Damn and blast it, get up, bitch.”
She leaped out of bed, jerked
