Part 10 (1/2)
”They're planting potatoes to-morrow and we were to go and work; and Horieneke was to come too.”
”Ay.”
”But she'll stay here!”
”What do you mean, stay here?”
”Yes, she's got her work to do at home.”
”All right; but if she has to go?”
”Don't care.”
And mother stood with her arms akimbo, looking at her husband, waiting for his answer.
”And if he turns us out and leaves us without work!”
”And suppose our child comes home with a present ... from that beast of a farmer!”
Ivo knocked out his pipe:
”Pooh, that could happen to her anywhere; and, after all, she won't be tied to her mother's ap.r.o.n-strings all her life long!... When you live in a man's house and eat his bread, you've got to work for it and do his will: the master is the master. Come, let's go to bed; we've a lot to do tomorrow.”
Suppressed sobs came from the little bedroom. Mother looked in. Horieneke lay with her hands before her eyes, crying convulsively.
”Well, what's the matter?”
The child pressed her head to the wall and wept harder than ever.
”Come along, wife, d.a.m.n it! It's time that all this foolery was over, or she'll lose her senses altogether.”
Mother grew impatient, bit her teeth:
”Oh, you blessed cry-baby!”
And angrily she thumped the child on the hip with her clenched fist and left her lying there.
”A nice thing, getting children: one'd rather bring up puppies any day!”
She turned out the light and it was now dark and still; outside, the thin rain dripped and the white blossoms blew from the trees and the whole air smelt wonderfully good. In the distance, the nightingale hidden in the wood jugged and gurgled without stopping; and it was like the pealing of a church-organ all night long.
The weather had broken up and the day dawned with a melancholy drizzle and a cold wind. The sky remained grey, discharging misty raindrops which soaked into everything and hung trembling like strung pearls on the leaves of the beech-hedge and on the gra.s.s and on the cornstalks in the fields. It was suddenly winter again. On the hilly field the people stood black, wrapped up, with their caps drawn over their ears and their red handkerchiefs round their necks. The hoes went up in the air one after the other and struck the moist earth, which opened into straight furrows from one end to the other of the field. Here wives walked barefoot, bent, with baskets on their arm from which they kept taking potatoes and laying them, at a foot's distance, in the open trench. In a corner of the field stood the farmer, his big body leaning on a stick; and his dark eyes watched his labourers.
There, in the midst of them, was Horieneke, bent also like the others, in her coa.r.s.e workaday clothes, with a basket of seed-potatoes on her arm; and her red-gold curls now hung, like long corkscrews, wet against her face; and every now and then she would draw herself up, tossing her head back to keep them out of her eyes.
VI. IN THE SQUALL
At noon, under the blazing sun, all three started for the wood, after blackberries.
Trientje was in her cotton pinafore, with a straw hat on her head and a wicker basket on her arm. Lowietje stood in his worn breeches and his torn s.h.i.+rt; in his pocket he had a new climbing-cord. Each dragged Poentje by one hand, Poentje who still went about in his little s.h.i.+rt and, with his wide-straddling little bare legs, trotted on between brother and sister.