on his part resulted in his being married, in view of the allotment his wife would receive. As soon as the armistice was signed, he had gone to work on the construction gang in the grain elevators along the wharf and after that had become permanently employed. His family circle today, comprising ten children, was apparently complete, and Madame Boucher with great magnanimity would distribute heaps of baby clothes to young married couples. As the tots came, Joseph had taken on a crabbed mien. There was nothing of the vers-libriste about him any longer; he rather resembled a tree that with the coming of autumn had shed its flowers, fruit, and leaves. The mother, on the other hand, seemed to blossom out, and for each new angle that became visible on her husband’s body it was as if a new curve made its appearance on hers.
As she was screaming to her son that she was a respectable woman, voices were heard calling Denis from the yard.
“That’s right,” shouted Flora, “go on to your Mulots. Ignorant lot! That Jean Colin who was born two months after his parents were married. Everybody knows what La Barloute, his mother, is.”
She began peeling the apples that had been left on the table as Colin and the Langevins gathered around Denis, and Gaston came out to join them. Denis, astonished to see them so agitated, gazed at each of them in turn. Jean, especially, was unable to stand still.
“It’s almost unbelievable,” he said. “Just imagine —” He broke off as he saw Madame Boucher, who had come to the doorway to listen. “Come over to the shed.”
They had crossed the street, for the Colins lived directly opposite the Bouchers. Gaston followed them as best he could, putting into each breath he took all the energy that a feeble person expends in trying to keep up with the others; he was breathing harder and more painfully all the time. The “shed” was a tumble-down coach house that was rotting from the ground up — how it remained standing was a miracle.
“Let’s sit in the victoria,” suggested Robert Langevin, the lazy one.
The victoria stood in the centre of the shed, as black and memory-laden as a coffin on wheels. Jean’s grandfather Colin, old man Pitou, had been a coachman for the tourist trade and it was the family’s title to fame to have an ancestor who had driven American millionaires about.
“Let’s help ourselves from the buffet,” said Jean, lifting up the carriage seat. There were the stolen apples. He watched the leader out of the corner of his eye, enjoying Denis’s curiosity. Finally he could contain himself no longer. “It was a girl who hid us,” he said. “And a pretty one!” he added in an enthusiastic tone of voice.
Denis frowned. “Who was she?”
“Père Lévesque’s girl. You know, the educated one, who was away at the convent.”
“Who is that?” asked Germaine Colin, who had just come in with a bundle under her arm. Denis gave her a look.
“Mind your own business, you,” Jean rebuked her. At sight of Denis, Germaine decided to stay.
“Sit down here,” whispered Robert.
“I just finished scrubbing one of those ceilings,” she said. “But look at the two bucks I got for it.”
“Don’t be telling us your troubles,” said big Jacques Langevin. “Listen.”
Gaston slipped a thin arm into the front of his shirt and handed Germaine an apple. “Eat it.”
Jean began his recital with that slight degree of exaggeration that expansive souls display in relating their first exploits. The Langevins interrupted him frequently, for they wished their leader to know that they too had been present. Denis was silent. His right eye was almost shut as if in mockery while the other held a reflective look.
Gaston, who did not understand all that was being said, kept his gaze fastened on Germaine’s chin, her hair, her bosom, and the holes in her stocking which afforded him a glimpse of the chapped flesh of her knees. Her face was beautiful, and her lids appeared to be drowsing above her eyes, which were young and full of life. They were like any other pair of eyes, except that they were neither blue nor grey nor black but a little of each. Her hair was faded-looking, and there were a few tarnished curls on the back of her neck, the remains of a permanent. At the corners of her thin lips a faint crease held a hint of derision: the narrow bed of a puny pride sapped by poverty. Germaine at eighteen was already old, having lost amid the mops she plied on other people’s floors that naive trust in happiness which is natural in the young. A glint of sunlight through a crevice in the roof played upon her face but was poorly reflected there owing to the dried perspiration and the grime which her features had absorbed. Beneath her rumpled, tight-fitting dress her bosom was suggestively outlined, and at sight of it Gaston’s big childlike eyes beneath his man’s forehead became so animated that one would have said the look in them was inspired by lust.
Jean was spreading his arms in declamatory fashion: “That’s just what she said to me: ‘Don’t tell anybody!’ And maybe you think she didn’t know how to talk.”
“She talked to us, too,” put in the Langevins. Denis kept silent.
“She’ll make a swell girlfriend for you, a young lady,” remarked Germaine.
At this insinuation, Denis sprang up showing his large, strong teeth; there was a gleam in his brown eyes and his face was savagely contorted.
“I was waiting for you to say that. There you are, parish love affairs again. That’s the way love gets you. Are you like all the others, then?” He turned to Jean: “And you, Colin, in love already, you who were bragging you could overcome it? Don’t you realize that it means the end of your freedom? Haven’t you noticed how the love of our parents has turned into kitchen wrangling?”
Jean blushed but said nothing. He was thinking of Lise and how she had asked him not to tell. The Langevins were protesting, their little eyes sparkling from among their freckles.
“You have to get married sometime or other. And besides, love is not always the fault of the girls!”
“Shut up, you idiots! Their charms are like glue. But I’m here to protect you, my lads.” Denis was particularly concerned with maintaining his domination over Jean, whose silence led him to believe that he was still in command. “I had faith in you,” he continued, “in a gang that would be independent of girls.”
“Those are fine words, I must say,” was Germaine’s admiring comment, “but Jean is old enough.”
“That’s no concern of yours!” Jean snapped, turning upon his sister. “This is a man’s affair.”
The dispute was interrupted by the arrival of Tit-Blanc Colin and Chaton, the worm vendor, who was Jean’s formidable rival in that business. Jean’s father was drunk and had his arm around his companion’s neck. Chaton made for the worm box and lifted the lid.
“They’re rather fat and sluggish,” he said, crushing a clod of earth with the gesture of a connoisseur. “You don’t have such an awfully large stock. For a lot of creepy worms like these I can offer you a couple of dollars.”
Jean looked him over contemptuously. “They’re not for sale. And what’s more, I can show you a thing or two, Chaton.”
Tit-Blanc solemnly raised his arm. “It’s no use, Chaton, old pal,” he said. “Those worms bring in too good money. They are bread and butter.” Slyly the drunkard made the rounds of the group,
