Martin’s Girl
It happened to him one Sunday after Mass. He came out of church and was following the sunken road that led to his house, when he found himself behind Martin’s girl, who also was on her way home.
The head of the house marched beside his daughter with the consequential step of the prosperous farmer. Disdaining a smock, he wore a sort of jacket of grey cloth, and on his head a wide-brimmed felt hat.
She, squeezed into stays that she only laced once a week, walked along stiffly, swinging her arms a little, her waist compressed, broad-shouldered, her hips swinging as she walked.
On her head she wore a flower-trimmed hat, the creation of an Yvetot milliner, that left bare all her strong, supple, rounded neck; short downy hairs, bleached by sun and open air, blew about it.
Benoist saw only her back, but her face was familiar enough to him, although he had never really looked at it.
“Dammit,” he said abruptly, “she’s a rare fine wench after all, is Martin’s girl.” He watched her walking along, filled with a sudden admiration, his senses stirred. He did not in the least need to see her face again. He kept his eyes fixed on her figure; one thought hammered in his mind, as if he had said it aloud: “Dammit, she’s a rare fine wench.”
Martin’s girl turned to the right to enter Martin’s Farm, the farm belonging to Jean Martin, her father; she turned round and looked behind her. She saw Benoist, whom she thought a very queer-looking fellow.
“Good morning, Benoist,” she called.
“Good morning, lass; good morning, Martin,” he answered, and walked on.
When he reached his own house, the soup was on the table. He sat down opposite his mother, beside the hired man and the labourer, while the servant girl went to draw the cider.
He ate some spoonfuls, then pushed away his plate.
“Are you sick?” his mother asked.
“No,” he answered. “It feels like I had porridge in my stomach and it spoils my appetite.”
He watched the others eating, every now and then breaking off a mouthful of bread that he carried slowly to his lips and chewed for a long time. He was thinking of Martin’s girl: “She’s a rare fine wench after all.” And to think he had never noticed it until this moment, and that it had come upon him like this, out of a clear sky, and so desperately that he could not eat.
He hardly touched the stew. His mother said:
“Come, Benoist, make yourself eat a morsel; it’s a bit of loin, it’ll do you good. When you’ve no appetite, you ought to make yourself eat.”
He swallowed a little, then pushed his plate aside again—no, it was no better.
When the meal was over, he went off round the fields, and gave the labourer the afternoon off, promising to look to the beasts on the way round.
The countryside was deserted, it being the day of rest. Under the noon sun, the cows lay placidly about in a field of clover, wide-bellied, chewing the cud. Unyoked ploughs were waiting in the corner of a ploughed field; and the wide brown squares of upturned fields, ready for the sowing, stretched between patches of yellow covered with the rotting stubble of corn and oats long since gathered in.
An autumn wind, a rather dry wind, blew over the plain with the promise of a fresh evening after sunset. Benoist sat down on the edge of a dike, rested his hat on his knees, as if he needed the air on his head, and declared aloud, in the silent countryside: “As fine girls go, she’s a rare fine one.”
He was still thinking about her when night came, in his bed, and in the morning, when he woke.
He was not unhappy, he was not restless: he could hardly say what his feelings were. It was something that held him, something that had fastened on his imagination, an idea that obsessed him and roused something like a thrill in his heart. A big fly sometimes gets shut up in a room. You hear it fly round, buzzing, and the sound obsesses and irritates. Suddenly it stops: you forget it, but all at once it begins again, forcing you to raise your head. You can neither catch it nor chase it nor kill it nor make it keep still. It settles for a brief moment, and begins droning again.
Just so, the memory of Martin’s girl flitted distractedly through Benoist’s mind like an imprisoned fly.
Then he was seized with desire to see her again, and walked several times past Martin’s Farm. At last he caught a glimpse of her hanging washing on a line stretched between two apple trees.
It was warm: she had taken off everything but a short petticoat, and the single chemise she wore clearly revealed the curve of her body when she lifted her arms to peg out the napkins.
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 wild impulse to succour her, comfort her, take away her pain. He stooped, took her in his arms, lifted her up, carried her to her bed, and while she continued to moan, he undressed her, taking off her bodice, her skirt, her petticoat. She was gnawing her fists to keep from screaming. Then he did for her all he was used to do for beasts, for cows and sheep and mares: he helped her and received between his hands a plump wailing child.
He washed it, wrapped it in a dishcloth that was drying before the fire and laid it on a pile of linen that was lying on the table to be ironed; then he went back to the mother.
He laid her on the floor again, changed the bed, and put her back in it. She stammered: “Thanks, Benoist, you’re a kind soul.” And she wept a few tears, as if she were regretting things a little.
As for him, he felt no love for her now, none at all. It was over. Why? How? He could not have said. The events of the last hour had cured him more effectually than ten years’ absence would have done.
Exhausted and fainting, she asked:
“What is it?”
He answered calmly:
“It’s a girl, and a very fine one.”
They were silent again. A few moments later, the mother spoke in a weak voice:
“Show her to me, Benoist.”
He went to bring the infant, and he was offering it to her as if he held the holy sacrament, when the door opened and Isidore Vallin appeared.
At first he did not understand; then, suddenly, realisation came to him.
Benoist, filled with dismay, stammered:
“I was going past, I was just going past, when I heard her screaming, and I came in … here’s your baby, Vallin.”
Tears in his eyes, the husband stooped towards him and took the tiny morsel the other held out to him, kissed it; a moment he stood, his emotion choking him; he laid his child back on the bed and, holding out both hands to Benoist:
“Put it there, Benoist, put it there: there’s nothing more for you and me to say now. We’ll be friends if you’re willing; eh, friends!”
And Benoist answered:
“I’m willing, I am; of course I’m willing.”