The doctor raised his voice and said: "Honore, you cannot leave your
mother in this state; she may die at any moment." And the peasant, in
great distress, replied: "But I must get in my wheat, for it has been
lying on the ground a long time, and the weather is just right for it;
what do you say about it, mother?" And the dying woman, still possessed
by her Norman avariciousness, replied YES with her eyes and her
forehead, and so urged her son to get in his wheat, and to leave her to
die alone. But the doctor got angry, and stamping his foot he said:
"You are no better than a brute, do you hear, and I will not allow you
to do it. Do you understand? And if you must get in your wheat to-day,
go and fetch Rapet's wife and make her look after your mother. I WILL
have it. And if you do not obey me, I will let you die like a dog, when
you are ill in your turn; do you hear me?"

The peasant, a tall, thin fellow with slow movements, who was tormented
by indecision, by his fear of the doctor and his keen love of saving,
hesitated, calculated, and stammered out: "How much does La Rapet
charge for attending sick people?"

"How should I know?" the doctor cried. "That depends upon how long she
is wanted for. Settle it with her, by Jove! But I want her to be here
within an hour, do you hear."

So the man made up his mind. "I will go for her," he replied; "don't
get angry, doctor." And the latter left, calling out as he went: "Take
care, you know, for I do not joke when I am angry!" And as soon as they
were alone, the peasant turned to his mother, and said in a resigned
voice: "I will go and fetch La Rapet, as the man will have it. Don't go
off while I am away."

And he went out in his turn.

La Rapet, who was an old washerwoman, watched the dead and the dying of
the neighborhood, and then, as soon as she had sewn her customers into
that linen cloth from which they would emerge no more, she went and
took up her irons to smooth the linen of the living. Wrinkled like a
last year's apple, spiteful, envious, avaricious with a phenomenal
avarice, bent double, as if she had been broken in half across the
loins, by the constant movement of the iron over the linen, one might
have said that she had a kind of monstrous and cynical affection for a
death struggle. She never spoke of anything but of the people she had
seen die, of the various kinds of deaths at which she had been present,
and she related, with the greatest minuteness, deta