Mother Duroy did not speak, but remained sad and grim, watching her daughter-in-law out of the corner of her eye, with hatred awakened in her heart—the hatred of an old toiler, an old rustic with fingers worn and limbs bent by hard work—for the city madame, who inspired her with the repulsion of an accursed creature, an impure being, created 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 treetops; 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
