Boredom reigned at Uderan—dense and oppressive. In order not to slow down their arrival at the Barque Inn in Semoic, Jacques Grant preferred to meet George Durieux midway between the village and the property. For this reason the latter came to Uderan less and less frequently. The last time had been two weeks earlier, and it was on this occasion that he seemed to be interested in Maud.
“Every summer I organize a fishing party for crayfish. I’d like to have the three of you with me. I’ll let you know when,” he had said. His cordial tone indicated that he owed a certain politeness to the Tanerans and that he was simply fulfilling his duty. Since that time, he had not come back to the estate; he took the loop of The Pardal to connect with the road to Semoic and also avoided taking the shortcut across the property. Clearly, he was withdrawing from their company, and it seemed unimaginable they would see him again someday.
Mrs. Taneran, who greatly missed him, was worried. “How is it that we don’t see Durieux anymore? Is he still going to Barque’s?” Then, noticing that Jacques now left for Semoic without waiting for his friend, she vehemently reproached him. “Your sister and I are dying of boredom here. You’ve taken away the least bit of company from us, as usual. If I see Durieux I’ll tell him what I think.”
Mrs. Taneran did nothing at Uderan. Her lack of activity had become all the more unsupportable because not only Mrs. Pecresse, but all the Pardalians, kept her at a disdainful distance, as much because of her own attitude toward her neighbors as because of that of her son. But Jacques had laughed at his mother’s reproaches. “You think he enjoyed coming here! He just came to be polite, poor Durieux. You’re wrong about people; you don’t know what kind of man he is, that Durieux…”
At the end of her patience, Maud finally stopped spending her afternoons in the yard, and, to give herself some purpose, she went looking for the Deddes’ daughter, who kept the cows near the Riotor. But the tenant farmer’s daughter, whom she questioned somewhat obliquely, revealed very little about George. The Deddes’ daughter also frequented Barque’s. “You should come, Miss Grant. What’s nice there is that nobody pays any attention to you. I’m taking advantage of it before winter.” But Maud was no more inclined to go there than she was to come out of her habitual solitude.
They began to rearrange the three rooms of the tenant farmer’s home where Jacques was going to live, and Maud helped a little, although she didn’t like finding herself with her mother, whose recent, inexplicable tenderness embarrassed her (she didn’t know what Mrs. Pecresse could have told her, the evening she knocked at the gate, but Maud had avoided coming back to their neighbor’s until later that evening, at mealtime, in order not to be alone with her mother). And soon, judging that it was even more worthless to take care of her brother’s affairs than to wander around, she did nothing.
Toward the middle of June it rained for a week. The Deddes’ daughter no longer took the cows out. Jacques’s furniture arrived from Bordeaux, but it was impossible to go and get it at the Semoic train station because the weather was so bad. The persistent rain clogged up the roads and fell listlessly in sudden bursts. On the hillside streaming with water, the grass was crushed, beaten down and licked by numerous rivulets. Maud gave up walking in that area.
They didn’t know where Henry was, whereas Jacques, finding it more convenient to live in his new quarters, slept there until it was time to leave for Semoic.
The farmers were upset with the rain. “It’s bad for the plums,” they moaned. “It takes away their taste…”
At Barque’s, however, everything continued at a lively pace, according to the Deddes’ daughter. The bad weather benefited the owner and attracted more and more people to his place. Maud, wearing a cape borrowed from the tenant farmer’s daughter, roamed the roads and lanes, trying to meet up with George. This incessant searching took up entire days, right up until evening, and soon became a personal obligation, although she never fully understood that she was no longer expecting much from her search.
She didn’t hold it against her brother in the least for monopolizing the man she loved. Fate had decided it. What could she do, in fact, against a form of seduction that always astonished her? In her brother’s circles, passions were always being ignited and then quenched, and someone was always absorbed by them. She could guess the reasons why her brother monopolized George, because they were the same ones that drew her to him: first of all, his shameless desire, like Jacques, to live the way he wanted to, half farmer, half delinquent. He gave you the feeling of scoring a victory if you succeeded in pleasing him. Neither Jacques nor George had an occupation, but Maud thought it would have been deplorable to see George tied up by some kind of job. If he loved her, one day he would devote all his moments, all his leisure time, to her…
One afternoon, she got a glimpse of him. He passed by next to her, dressed like a farmer, in a velvet vest, looking down, with his hands in his pockets and his features drawn and weary, unaware of the fact that Maud was observing him from behind the hawthorn bushes. Wasn’t he as far removed from thinking about her as she imagined him to be concerned with her? Under the endless rain, it must have been his own life, rather, that filled him with anxiety, and, as different as he was from Jacques, he resembled him, by virtue of the same battered look on his face brought on by the same kind of disgust.
Instead of bringing her joy, this apparition filled Maud with concern, and she didn’t take a single step to meet him. But as soon as he disappeared down the road, she regretted her cowardice. She ran as fast as she could across the fields, where her shoes got bogged down like noisy suction cups, and along the Riotor, which swept muddy water along, right up to the edge of its banks. The pressing desire to end the sinister drama of her love kept her on tenterhooks.
At the tenant farmer’s home, she found her mother sitting alone in an empty room, moaning. “I’m losing my mind, Maud. Can you believe that the furniture hasn’t arrived and Jacques isn’t looking after it any more than we are?” She noticed the expression on the face of her daughter, who was weeping nervously, like someone who is trying to keep from sobbing. Mrs. Taneran wasn’t overly surprised.
“It’s this weather, and I don’t know what it is we feel here; I’m worried, too, as if something were about to happen…” And then, reflecting a bit, she commented, “If you’re too bored, I can tell Henry to take you along with him…”
Around the tenant farm, the rain was falling straight down like hail. On the dark green pond, whose surface was riddled with raindrops, the two grindstones, already on their last legs, projected their shadows. The rain still pointed to summer’s nonchalance, expressing its opulence in the swollen foliage, the intense, impenetrable heat, and the fallen fruit that covered the paths with its freshly rotting flesh. Under the porch awning, the light perfume of honeysuckle filled the air with its fragrance, mixed with the odor of the wet sandstone and the subtle, slightly salted savor of the shower. In the distance, the roof of Uderan displayed its numerous chimneys, majestically framed by the tops of the pinewood.
But little by little the storm lost its strength. Soon the rain fell only in light bursts. The sky cleared; the exertion of the clouds in the sky took on a calmer appearance. Here and there, in the middle, the sky opened up to an intense and brilliant blue that one might have called wet.