new credulity knew of no doubt. The ill luck was broken. He spoke
cheerily to his wife. She was also hopeful. Three priests came to that

christening, and Madame Levaille was godmother. The child turned out
an idiot too.

Then on market days Jean-Pierre was seen bargaining bitterly,
quarrelsome and greedy; then getting drunk with taciturn earnestness;

then driving home in the dusk at a rate fit for a wedding, but with a
face gloomy enough for a funeral. Sometimes he would insist on his

wife coming with him; and they would drive in the early morning,
shaking side by side on the narrow seat above the helpless pig, that,

with tied legs, grunted a melancholy sigh at every rut. The morning
drives were silent; but in the evening, coming home, Jean-Pierre,

tipsy, was viciously muttering, and growled at the confounded woman
who could not rear children that were like anybody else's. Susan,

holding on against the erratic swayings of the cart, pretended not to
hear. Once, as they were driving through Ploumar, some obscure and

drunkenimpulse caused him to pull up sharply opposite the church. The
moon swam amongst light white clouds. The tombstones gleamed pale

under the fretted shadows of the trees in the churchyard. Even the
village dogs slept. Only the nightingales, awake, spun out the thrill

of their song above the silence of graves. Jean-Pierre said thickly to
his wife--

"What do you think is there?"
He pointed his whip at the tower--in which the big dial of the clock

appeared high in the moonlight like a pallid face without eyes--and
getting out carefully, fell down at once by the wheel. He picked

himself up and climbed one by one the few steps to the iron gate of
the churchyard. He put his face to the bars and called out

indistinctly--
"Hey there! Come out!"

"Jean! Return! Return!" entreated his wife in low tones.
He took no notice, and seemed to wait there. The song of nightingales

beat on all sides against the high walls of the church, and flowed
back between stone crosses and flat gray slabs, engraved with words of

hope and sorrow.
"Hey! Come out!" shouted Jean-Pierre, loudly.

The nightingales ceased to sing.
"Nobody?" went on Jean-Pierre. "Nobody there. A swindle of the crows.

That's what this is. Nobody anywhere. I despise it. Allez! Houp!"
He shook the gate with all his strength, and the iron bars rattled

with a frightful clanging, like a chain dragged over stone steps. A
dog near by barked hurriedly" target="_blank" title="ad.仓促地，忙乱地">hurriedly. Jean-Pierre staggered back, and after

three successive dashes got into his cart. Susan sat very quiet and
still. He said to her with drunken severity--

"See? Nobody. I've been made a fool! Malheur! Somebody will pay for
it. The next one I see near the house I will lay my whip on . . . on

the black spine . . . I will. I don't want him in there . . . he only
helps the carrion crows to rob poor folk. I am a man. . . . We will

see if I can't have children like anybody else . . . now you
mind. . . . They won't be all . . . all . . . we see. . . ."

She burst out through the fingers that hid her face--
"Don't say that, Jean; don't say that, my man!"

He struck her a swinging blow on the head with the back of his hand
and knocked her into the bottom of the cart, where she crouched,

thrown about lamentably by every jolt. He drove furiously, standing
up, brandishing his whip, shaking the reins over the gray horse that

galloped ponderously, making the heavy harness leap upon his broad
quarters. The country rang clamorous in the night with the irritated

barking of farm dogs, that followed the rattle of wheels all along the
road. A couple of belated wayfarers had only just time to step into

the ditch. At his own gate he caught the post and was shot out of the
cart head first. The horse went on slowly to the door. At Susan's

piercing cries the farm hands rushed out. She thought him dead, but he
was only sleeping where he fell, and cursed his men, who hastened to

him, for disturbing his slumbers.
Autumn came. The clouded sky descended low upon the black contours of

the hills; and the dead leaves danced in spiral whirls under naked
trees, till the wind, sighing profoundly, laid them to rest in the

hollows of bare valleys. And from morning till night one could see all
over the land black denuded boughs, the boughs gnarled and twisted, as

if contorted with pain, swaying sadly between the wet clouds and the
soaked earth. The clear and gentle streams of summer days rushed

discoloured and raging at the stones that barred the way to the sea,
with the fury of madness bent upon suicide. From horizon to horizon

the great road to the sands lay between the hills in a dull glitter of
empty curves, resembling an unnavigable river of mud.

Jean-Pierre went from field to field, moving blurred and tall in the
drizzle, or striding on the crests of rises, lonely and high upon the

gray curtain of drifting clouds, as if he had been pacing along the
very edge of the universe. He looked at the black earth, at the

earth mute and promising, at the mysterious earth doing its work of
life in death-like stillness under the veiled sorrow of the sky. And

it seemed to him that to a man worse than childless there was no
promise in the fertility of fields, that from him the earth escaped,

defied him, frowned at him like the clouds, sombre and hurried above
his head. Having to face alone his own fields, he felt the inferiority

of man who passes away before the clod that remains. Must he give up
the hope of having by his side a son who would look at the turned-up

sods with a master's eye? A man that would think as he thought, that
would feel as he felt; a man who would be part of himself, and yet

remain to trample masterfully on that earth when he was gone? He
thought of some distant relations, and felt savage enough to curse

them aloud. They! Never! He turned homewards, going straight at the
roof of his dwelling, visible between the enlaced skeletons of trees.

As he swung his legs over the stile a cawing flock of birds settled
slowly on the field; dropped down behind his back, noiseless and

fluttering, like flakes of soot.
That day Madame Levaille had gone early in the afternoon to the house

she had near Kervanion. She had to pay some of the men who worked in
her granitequarry there, and she went in good time because her little

house contained a shop where the workmen could spend their wages
without the trouble of going to town. The house stood alone amongst

rocks. A lane of mud and stones ended at the door. The sea-winds
coming ashore on Stonecutter's point, fresh from the fierceturmoil of

the waves, howled violently at the unmoved heaps of black boulders
holding up steadily short-armed, high crosses against the tremendous

rush of the invisible. In the sweep of gales the sheltered dwelling
stood in a calm resonant and disquieting, like the calm in the centre

of a hurricane. On stormy nights, when the tide was out, the bay of
Fougere, fifty feet below the house, resembled an immense black pit,

from which ascended mutterings and sighs as if the sands down there
had been alive and complaining. At high tide the returning water

assaulted the ledges of rock in short rushes, ending in bursts of
livid light and columns of spray, that flew inland, stinging to death

the grass of pastures.
The darkness came from the hills, flowed over the coast, put out the

red fires of sunset, and went on to seaward pursuing the retiring
tide. The wind dropped with the sun, leaving a maddened sea and a

devastated sky. The heavens above the house seemed to be draped in
black rags, held up here and there by pins of fire. Madame Levaille,

for this evening the servant of her own workmen, tried to induce them
to depart. "An old woman like me ought to be in bed at this late

hour," she good-humouredly repeated. The quarrymen drank, asked for
more. They shouted over the table as if they had been talking across a

field. At one end four of them played cards, banging the wood with
their hard knuckles, and swearing at every lead. One sat with a lost

gaze, humming a bar of some song, which he repeated endlessly. Two
others, in a corner, were quarrelling confidentially and fiercely

over some woman, looking close into one another's eyes as if they had
wanted to tear them out, but speaking in whispers that promised