Catherine and one boy by the ears and led them back towards the village, clutching them tightly with his big hairy fingers, and overwhelming them with abuse.
The priest walked on again. Brother Archangias sometimes aroused strange scruples in his mind. With his vulgarity and coarseness the Brother seemed to him the true man of God, free from earthly ties, submissive in all to Heaven’s will, humble, blunt, ready to shower abuse upon sin. He, the priest, would then feel despair at his inability to rid himself more completely of his body; he regretted that he was not ugly, unclean, covered with vermin like some of the saints. Whenever the Brother had wounded him by some words of excessive coarseness, or by some over-hasty churlishness, he would blame himself for his refinement, his innate shrinking, as if these were really faults. Ought he not to be dead to all the weaknesses of this world? And this time also he smiled sadly as he thought how near he had been to losing his temper at the Brother’s roughly put lesson. It was pride, it seemed to him, seeking to work his perdition by making him despise the lowly. However, in spite of himself, he felt relieved at being alone again, at being able to walk on gently, reading his breviary, free at last from the grating voice that had disturbed his dream of heavenly love.
VI
The road wound on between fallen rocks, among which the peasants had succeeded here and there in reclaiming six or seven yards of chalky soil, planted with old olive trees. Under the priest’s feet the dust in the deep ruts crackled lightly like snow. At times, as he felt a warmer puff upon his face, he would raise his eyes from his book, as if to seek whence came this soft caress; but his gaze was vacant, straying without perception over the glowing horizon, over the twisted outlines of that passion-breathing landscape as it stretched out in the sun before him, dry, barren, despairing of the fertilisation for which it longed. And he would lower his hat over his forehead to protect himself against the warm breeze and tranquilly resume his reading, his cassock raising behind him a cloudlet of dust which rolled along the surface of the road.
‘Good morning, Monsieur le Cure,’ a passing peasant said to him.
Sounds of digging alongside the cultivated strips of ground again roused him from his abstraction. He turned his head and perceived big knotty-limbed old men greeting him from among the vines. The Artauds were eagerly satisfying their passion for the soil, in the sun’s full blaze. Sweating brows appeared from behind the bushes, heaving chests were slowly raised, the whole scene was one of ardent fructification, through which he moved with the calm step born of ignorance. No discomfort came to him from the great travail of love that permeated that splendid morning.
‘Steady! Voriau, you mustn’t eat people!’ some one gaily shouted in a powerful voice by way of silencing the dog’s loud barks.
Abbe Mouret looked up.
‘Oh! it’s you. Fortune?’ he said, approaching the edge of the field in which the young peasant was at work. ‘I was just on my way to speak to you.’
Fortune was of the same age as the priest: a bigly built, bold-looking young fellow, with skin already hardened. He was clearing a small plot of stony heath.
‘What about, Monsieur le Cure?’ he asked.
‘About Rosalie and you,’ replied the priest.
Fortune began to laugh. Perhaps he thought it droll that a priest should interest himself in such a matter.
‘Well,’ he muttered, ‘I’m not to blame in it nor she either. So much the worse if old Bambousse refuses to let me have her. You saw yourself how his dog was trying to bite me just now; he sets him on me.’
Then, as Abbe Mouret was about to continue, old Artaud, called Brichet, whom he had not previously perceived, emerged from the shadow of a bush behind which he and his wife were eating. He was a little man, withered by age, with a cringing face.
‘Your reverence must have been told a pack of lies,’ he exclaimed. ‘The youngster is quite ready to marry Rosalie. What’s happened isn’t anybody’s fault. It has happened to others who got on all right just the same. The matter doesn’t rest with us. You ought to speak to Bambousse. He’s the one who looks down on us because he’s got money.’
‘Yes, we are very poor,’ whined his wife, a tall lachrymose woman, who also rose to her feet. ‘We’ve only this scrap of ground where the very devil seems to have been hailing stones. Not a bite of bread from it, even. Without you, your reverence, life would be impossible.’
Brichet’s wife was the one solitary devotee of the village. Whenever she had been to communion, she would hang about the parsonage, well knowing that La Teuse always kept a couple of loaves for her from her last baking. At times she was even able to carry off a rabbit or a fowl given her by Desiree.
‘There’s no end to the scandals,’ continued the priest. ‘The marriage must take place without delay.’
‘Oh! at once! as soon as the others are agreeable,’ said the old woman, alarmed about her periodical presents. ‘What do you say, Brichet? we are not such bad Christians as to go against his reverence?’
Fortune sniggered.
‘Oh, I’m quite ready,’ he said, ‘and so is Rosalie. I saw her yesterday at the back of the mill. We haven’t quarrelled. We stopped there to have a bit of a laugh.’
But Abbe Mouret interrupted him: ‘Very well, I am now going to speak to Bambousse. He is over there, at Les Olivettes, I believe.’
The priest was going off when the mother asked him what had become of her younger son Vincent, who had left in the early morning to serve mass. There was a lad now who badly needed his reverence’s admonitions. And she walked by the priest’s side for another hundred yards, bemoaning her poverty, the failure of the potato crop, the frost which had nipped the olive trees, the hot weather which threatened to scorch up the scanty corn. Then, as she left him, she solemnly declared that her son Fortune always said his prayers, both morning and evening.
Voriau now ran on in front, and suddenly, at a turn in the road, he bolted across the fields. The priest then struck into a small path leading up a low hill. He was now at Les Olivettes, the most fertile spot in the neighbourhood, where the mayor of the commune, Artaud, otherwise Bambousse, owned several fields of corn, olive plantations, and vines. The dog was now romping round the skirts of a tall brunette, who burst into a loud laugh as she caught sight of the priest.
‘Is your father here, Rosalie?’ the latter asked.
‘Yes, just across there,’ she said, pointing with her hand and still smiling.
Leaving the part of the field she had been weeding, she walked on before him with the vigorous springiness of a hard-working woman, her head unshielded from the sun, her neck all sunburnt, her hair black and coarse like a horse’s mane. Her green-stained hands exhaled the odour of the weeds she had been pulling up.
‘Father,’ she called out, ‘here’s Monsieur le Cure asking for you.’
And there she remained, bold, unblushing, with a sly smile still hovering over her features. Bambousse, a stout, sweating, round-faced man, left his work and gaily came towards the priest.
‘I’d take my oath you are going to speak to me about the repairs of the church,’ he exclaimed, as he clapped his earthy hands. ‘Well, then, Monsieur le Cure, I can only say no, it’s impossible. The commune hasn’t got the coin. If the Lord provides plaster and tiles, we’ll provide the workmen.’
At this jest of his the unbelieving peasant burst into a loud guffaw, slapped his thighs, coughed, and almost
