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, to do the whole job. I’ve got to take a risk one way and the other. The doctor says she’ll go any minute. If that happens, you win—and then I lose. But if she holds out till tomorrow or for longer, I win and you lose.”
The nurse looked at the man in surprise. She had never yet treated death as a gamble. She hesitated, tempted by the thought of making a lucky bargain. Then she suspected that she was being tricked.
“I’ll not say one way or the other until I’ve seen your mother,” she replied.
“Come on, then, and look at her.”
She dried her hands and went with him at once.
On the way not a word passed between them. She walked with a hurried step, while he stretched his great limbs as if he had a brook to cross at each stride.
The cows, lying down in the fields, overpowered by the heat, raised their heads heavily, lowing faintly as the couple passed them, as if asking for fresh grass.
As he drew near the house, Honoré murmured:
“Perhaps it’s all over after all.” His unconscious wish spoke in the tones of his voice.
But the old woman was far from dead. She was lying on her back, in her wretched bed, her hands outside the purple oriental counterpane, her terrible emaciated hands, knotted like the talons of some strange beast, or like a crab’s claws, doubled up by rheumatism, fatigue and the daily toil which had been her lot. Mother Rapet went over to the bed and considered the dying woman. She felt her pulse, touched her chest and listened to her breathing, asked her a question to hear her voice in reply, then, having looked at her again for a long time, she went out, followed by Honoré. His conviction was strengthened. The old woman would not last out the night. He asked: “Well?”
The nurse answered: “H’m. She’ll last two days, p’raps three. You can make it six francs the lump sum.”
He cried out at that:
“Six francs! Six francs! Have you lost your wits! I swear she won’t live more than five or six hours—no longer.”
They argued for a while, both very obstinate.
At last he had to give way, the nurse was at the point of going, time was passing, and his corn couldn’t be got in without him.
“All right,” he said. “Six francs, all told—including the washing of the corpse.”
“Done! Six francs.”
He went out with great strides towards his corn, which lay on the ground under the fierce sun that ripens the harvest.
The nurse went back into the house.
She had brought her sewing, for when she was tending the dying or dead, she worked unceasingly—sometimes for herself, sometimes for the family who employed her in this double task for an extra fee.
All at once, she asked:
“I suppose you’ve seen the priest at any rate, Mother Bontemps?”
The old woman shook her head; and Mother Rapet, who was pious, got up with alacrity.
“Good God! Is it possible? I’ll go and fetch M. le Curé.”
With that she ran to the presbytery in such haste that the urchins in the marketplace, seeing her hurrying thus, thought some accident had happened.
The priest came out immediately in his surplice, preceded by a choir boy who rang a little bell to herald the passing of God through the calm, brilliant countryside. Men who were working a long way off took off their great hats and stood without moving, until the white robe disappeared behind a farm; the women who were gathering the sheaves stood upright and made the sign of the cross; some black hens, terrified, flew along to ditches with a wild, jerky gait to a hole well known to them, where they disappeared hurriedly; a colt tethered in a field took fright at the sight of the surplice and started running round and round at the end of his string, throwing his hind legs high in the air. The choir boy in his red skirt walked quickly and the priest with his head drooping slightly on one side and crowned with its square biretta, followed him, murmuring his prayers as he went; last of all came old Rapet, all bowed down, nearly doubled in two as though she were trying to walk and prostrate herself at the same time, her fingers clasped as in church.
Honoré, from the distance, saw them pass. He asked: “Where’st a going, Father?”
His labourer, quicker-witted than he, replied: “He’s taking the Sacrament to your mother, bless you.” The peasant was not at all astonished.
“That’s all to the good, anyhow.”
And he went on with his work again. Mother Bontemps made her confession, received absolution and was given communion; and the priest went home again, leaving the two women alone in the stifling bedroom.
Then old Rapet began to think about the dying woman, and wondered whether she was going to last much longer.
The day was drawing in, fresher air came in in sharp gusts: a picture of Epinal, held by two pins, fluttered against the wall; the little curtains at the window, once white but yellowed now and spotted with fly blow, looked ready to take flight, to tear themselves free, as if they, like the soul of the old woman, would like to depart.
She lay there, motionless, her eyes open, seeming to await with utter indifference the death which was so close, yet so slow to come. Her breathing, sharp now, whistled a little in the contracted throat. She would die very soon and the world would hold one woman less whom nobody would regret.
As night fell Honoré came indoors. Going up to the bed, he saw that his mother was still living and he asked: “How are you?” just as he used to do when she was sick. Then he sent old Rapet away, telling her:
“Tomorrow at five o’clock without fail.”
She repeated:
“Tomorrow, five o’clock.”
She came, in fact, at daybreak. Honoré was drinking the soup he had made for himself before going out into the fields.
The nurse asked him:
“Well, has your mother gone yet?”
He replied with a malicious smile:
“She’s getting on a bit better.”
Then he went out.
Old Rapet suddenly felt uneasy. She went up to the sufferer, who was lying in the same state, breathing painfully and imperceptibly, her eyes open and her clenched hands on the counterpane.
The nurse saw that this state might continue two days, four days or even eight days and fear gripped her miserly heart; then she was shaken by a furious anger against this trickster who had cheated her and against this old woman who would not die.
She set to work, however, and waited, her eyes fixed on the wrinkled face of Mother Bontemps.
Honoré came back to breakfast; he seemed happy, almost cheerful; then he went out again. He was certainly getting in his corn under excellent conditions.
Old Rapet was getting irritated: each minute that went by now was stolen time, stolen money. She wanted, wanted madly, to take this mulish old woman, this obstinate and pigheaded old woman by the neck and with a little shaking make an end of the little short breath that was stealing her time and her money.
Then she thought of the danger of doing that, and other ideas came into her head. She came up close to the bed and asked:
“Have you seen the devil yet?”
Mother Bontemps murmured:
“No.”
Then the nurse began to talk, telling her tales that would terrify the feeble soul of this dying woman.
Some minutes before one breathed one’s last, the devil appeared, she said, to all sick people. He had a broom in one hand, and a saucepan on his head. He made strange noises.
If you saw him, it was all over, you had only a few seconds to live. She enumerated all those in her charge to whom the devil had appeared that year: Joséphine Loisel, Eulalie Ratier, Sophie Padagnan, Séraphine Grospied.
Mother Bontemps, disturbed at last, shook in her bed, waved her hands, trying to turn her head so that she could see to the farthest corner of the room.
Suddenly old Rapet disappeared from the foot of the bed. She took a sheet from the cupboard and wrapped herself in it; then she set a stewpan on her head so that the three short curved legs stood on end like three horns. She grabbed a broom in her right hand and in her left a metal water-jug which she threw sharply in the air so that it fell down with a great noise.
It struck the floor with a terrible clatter. Then, clambering on to a chair, the nurse lifted the curtain that hung at the end of the bed and there appeared, waving her arms, uttering hoarse shrieks from the bottom of the iron pot that hid her face, and with her broom threatening the old dying peasant woman, like the devil in a Punch and Judy show.
Mad with fear, her eyes wild, the dying woman made a superhuman effort to get up and get away from it. She managed to get her shoulders and chest out of bed, then she fell back with a great sigh. It was all over.
Old Rapet placidly put everything back: the broom in the corner of the cupboard, the sheet inside, the stewpan on the stove, the water-jug on the shelf and the chair against the wall. Then with a professional gesture she closed the wide-staring eyes of the dead, placed on the bed a dish, poured into it a little of the water from the holy-water vessel, dipped in it the sprig of yew nailed on to the cupboard door and, kneeling down, began to recite fervently the prayers for the dead which she knew by heart, and which were part of her trade.
When Honoré returned, at nightfall, he found her there praying, and his first thought was that she had cheated him of twenty sous, for she had only spent three days and one night, which only came to five francs instead of the six which he owed her.