As soon as Buteau was alone, feeling dissatisfied with this waste of an afternoon, he took off his jacket and set to work threshing in the paved corner of the yard; he wanted a sack of corn for the morrow. However, he soon got tired of threshing alone. To warm him to his work he needed the cadence of two flails, keeping time together. So he called to Françoise, who frequently helped him in this work, as her loins were strong, and her arms as hard-set as a young man's. In spite of the slowness and the fatigue of this primitive method of threshing, Buteau had always refused to buy a machine, saying, like all petty landowners, that he preferred to thresh at a time just the quantity he needed.
"Hallo, Françoise! Are you coming?" he called.
Lise, who was leaning over some veal stewing with carrots, after commissioning her sister to look after a loin of roast-pork, wanted to prevent the girl obeying. But Buteau, who was not in the best of temper, threatened them both with a hiding.
"You cursed females! I'll smack your saucepans across your heads for you! One may well sweat for one's bread when you'd go and fry the whole house, to gobble it down with other people!"
Françoise, who had already slipped on a working dress for fear of getting her best clothes stained, was obliged to follow him. She took a flail with handle and flap of cornel wood, secured together with leather buckles. It was her own, polished by friction, and closely bound with string to prevent its slipping. Swinging it round over her head with both hands she brought it down on the wheat, striking the latter smartly with the whole length of the flap. She went on without stopping, raising the flail very high, turning it as upon a hinge, and then banging it down again with the mechanical, rhythmical movement of a blacksmith; while Buteau, opposite her, swung his flail in alternation. They soon became hot. The rhythm was accelerated, and nothing could now be seen but the flying flaps, rebounding every time and whirling behind their necks like birds tied by the feet.
After ten minutes or so, Buteau gave a slight cry. The flails stopped, and he turned the sheaf round, whereupon the flails started again. At the end of another ten minutes he ordered a new pause, and laid the sheaf open. It had to pass thus six times under the flaps before the grain was fully separated from the ears, and the straw could be tied up. Sheaf succeeded sheaf, and for two hours the regular noise of the flails pervaded the house, though above it, in the distance, there arose the prolonged snorting of the steam-thresher.
Françoise's cheeks were now flushed and her wrists swollen, and from all her glowing skin there emanated a kind of flame that quivered visibly in the air. Her open lips were panting. Bits of straw had become entangled in the loose locks of her hair. At every stroke, as she raised the flail, her right knee stretched her petticoat, her hip and bosom expanded, straining her dress, while the contour of her well-set frame showed roughly through the fabric. A button flew off her bodice, and Buteau saw her white skin beneath the sun-burnt line of her neck—an eminence of flesh that kept rising with the swing of her arms in the powerful play of the shoulder-muscles. This seemed to excite him still more; and the flails still fell, while the grain leapt and fell like hail under the panting strokes of the coupled threshers.
At a quarter to seven, at close of day, Fouan and the Delhommes presented themselves.
"We must finish this," shouted Buteau to them, without stopping. "Keep it up, Françoise!"
She stuck to it, striking still harder in the enthusiasm prompted by the labour and noise. And thus it was that Jean found them when he in his turn arrived. He felt a spasm of jealousy, and looked at them as if he had surprised them together. Busy with this warm work, each striking true in turn, both perspiring, so heated and so disarranged, they seemed to be engaged in some other more private business than that of threshing wheat. Perhaps Françoise, who was going at it so zealously, had the same idea, for she suddenly stopped short in embarrassment. Then Buteau, turning round, remained motionless for an instant, with surprise and wrath.