Patin did not answer. Then, with a terrible fear which made her heart
tremble, she climbed the ladder, opened the skylight, looked, saw
nothing, entered, looked about and found nothing. Sitting on some
straw, she began to cry, but while she was weeping, overcome by a
poignant and supernatural terror, she heard Patin talking in the room
below. He seemed less angry and he was saying: "Nasty weather! Fierce
wind! Nasty weather! I haven't eaten, damn it!"
She cried through the ceiling: "Here I am, Patin; I am getting your
meal ready. Don't get angry."
She ran down again. There was no one in the room. She felt herself
growing weak, as if death were touching her, and she tried to run and
get help from the neighbors, when a voice near her cried out: "I
haven't had my breakfast, by G----!"
And the parrot in his cage watched her with his round, knowing, wicked
eye. She, too, looked at him wildly, murmuring: "Ah! so it's you!"
He shook his head and continued: "Just you wait! I'll teach you how to
loaf."
What happened within her? She felt, she understood that it was he, the
dead man, who had come back, who had disguised himself in the feathers
of this bird in order to continue to torment her; that he would curse,
as formerly, all day long, and bite her, and swear at her, in order to
attract the neighbors and make them laugh. Then she rushed for the
cage and seized the bird, which scratched and tore her flesh with its
claws and beak. But she held it with all her strength between her
hands. She threw it on the ground and rolled over it with the frenzy
of one possessed. She crushed it and finally made of it nothing but a
little green, flabby lump which no longer moved or spoke. Then she
wrapped it in a cloth, as in a shroud, and she went out in her
nightgown, barefoot; she crossed the dock, against which the choppy
waves of the sea were beating, and she shook the cloth and let drop
this little dead thing, which looked like so much grass. Then she
returned, threw herself on her knees before the empty cage, and,
overcome by what she had done, kneeled and prayed for forgiveness, as
if she had committed some heinous crime.
[THE PIECE OF STRING]
It was market-day, and from all the country round Goderville the
peasants and their wives were coming toward the town. The men walked
slowly, throwing the whole body forward at every step of their long,
crooked legs. They were deformed from pushing the plough which makes
the left shoulder higher, and bends their figures sideways; from
reaping the grain, when they have to spread their legs so as to keep
on their feet. Their starched blue blouses, glossy as though
varnished, ornamented at collar and cuffs with a little embroidered
design and blown out around their bony bodies, looked very much like
balloons about to soar, whence issued two arms and two feet.
Some of these fellows dragged a cow or a calf at the end of a rope.
And just behind the animal followed their wives beating it over the
back with a leaf-covered branch to hasten its pace, and carrying large
baskets out of which protruded the heads of chickens or ducks. These
women walked more quickly and energetically than the men, with their
erect, dried-up figures, adorned with scanty little shawls pinned over
their flat bosoms, and their heads wrapped round with a white cloth,
enclosing the hair and surmounted by a cap.