Complete Works of Emile Zola (142 page)

Madeleine was still poking the fire. Her face had lost none of its impenetrable rigidity. At each movement of her arm, as she stirred the ashes, the dressing-gown had gradually slipped down.

William could not remove his eyes from this body, which was becoming exposed by each motion, and displaying itself in all its wanton and superb fulness. It seemed to him a profusion of impurity. Each action of the arms made the fleshy muscles of the shoulder stand out, and produced on him the effect of a lascivious spasm. He had never suffered so much. He thought: “I am not the only one who knows these little cavities formed below her neck, when she holds out her bands.” The idea of having shared this woman with another man, and of only having come second, was unbearable. Like all delicate and nervous temperaments, he had a refinement of jealousy which was wounded by the merest trifle. He must have complete possession. The past terrified him, because he dreaded to find rivals as he looked back upon it, secret rivals, that be could not get at, and against whom he could not contend. His imagination then carried him away, and he dreamed of horrible things. To complete his misery, Madeleine’s first lover must be James, his friend, his brother. It was this that tortured him. He would have been simply irritated at any other man; but against James, be felt an indefinable feeling of painful and helpless revolt. The previous intimacy of his wife with the man whom he bad looked upon as a god in his youth, seemed to him one of those supremely infamous actions at which human reason is confounded with horror. He saw in it incest and sacrilege. He pardoned James, and wept tears of blood for him; he thought of him with a vague sensation of terror, as of a being out of his reach, who had mortally wounded him unknowingly, and to whom he would never return wound for wound. As for Madeleine, in the excitement of his bad dreams, which intensified the most transient sensations, she seemed dead to him for ever; by a strange subversion of the reality, he told himself that she was James’s wife and that he must never more touch her with his lips. The mere thought of a kiss filled him with horror; this flesh was repulsive in his eyes, for it seemed to him to belong to a creature whom he could only take to his arms in a desire for debauch. If his young wife had called him to her, he would have recoiled as if to avoid committing a crime. And he continued to forget himself in the painful sight of her nudity.

Madeleine dropped the poker. She threw herself back in the armchair, concealing her back and displaying her breast. With gloomy face she preserved her silence, and began to look vacantly at a bronze cup which stood at one end of the mantelpiece.

But, if William pardoned James, the wounds that be had inflicted were none the less painful. He had been betrayed in the only two love-passions he had known; fate had delighted in making its cruelties more acute, by wounding him in all his affections at once, by preparing long ago, with unheard-of refinement, the drama which to-day tortured his flesh and his brain. Now he had no one to love; the fetal knot which had already been tied between James and Madeleine seemed to him so strong, so living, that he accused them of adultery, as though they had, the night before, surrendered themselves to each other. He drove them with indignation from his memory, and again found himself alone in the world, in the chilly solitude of his youth. Then all the sufferings of his life came back to his mind; he felt Genevieve’s terrifying breath pass over his cradle, he saw himself again at school, covered with bruises, and he thought of his father’s violent death. How could he have deceived himself to such an extent as to believe that Heaven was becoming merciful? Heaven had sported with him by caressing him for an hour with a dream of peace. Then when he was beginning to be comforted, when he was looking forward to an existence of warm affection, Heaven had suddenly thrust him into a black and chilly abyss, thus making his fall the more cruel. He felt now that all this was the work of fate, that everything was dooming him to anguish. His history, which had seemed to him a crying injustice, was only a logical chain of facts. But he did not accept without revolt the continual crushing weight of events. His pride was being roused. He always retreated alone to his solitude, and this was because be was better, and of a more sensitive and delicate nature than other men. He knew how to love, and the world only knew how to wound. This thought of pride consoled him; he derived from it real energy which buoyed him up, and made him ready to fight again against fate. When the certitude of his nobleness came back to him, he grew calm to some extent, and looked at Madeleine’s shoulders with a remnant of disdain blended with tender pity.

His young wife was still absorbed in thought, and William asked himself what she could be thinking of like that Of James doubtless. This idea filled him with extreme pain, and he vainly tried to read on her face the thoughts that kept her motionless and silent. The truth was that Madeleine was thinking of nothing; she was half asleep, with her eyes open; she was crushed, hearing nothing but the confused hum of her anguish, which had now become calmer. Thus the young couple stayed till morning, in their silent motionless attitude, and never exchanging a word. A feeling of total loss of energy made the solitude they had come to seek perfectly oppressive. In spite of the fire which scorched their legs, they felt icy blasts passing over their shoulders. Outside, the storm was subsiding with softened and prolonged lamentations, like the plaintive howls of a suffering beast. It seemed a night without end, one of those nights of bad dreams, when we ardently wish for the dawn which seems as though it would never come.

Day came at last, a dirty wretched day, breaking slowly and gloomily. First, a dirty haze shed a pale light on the window panes; then the room became slowly filled with a yellowish vapour, which enveloped the furniture, leaving it as indistinct as before, and giving a dirty faded look to the hangings. You might have thought that a stream of mud was flowing over the carpet. The candle, now nearly out; grew pale in this dense mist.

William got up and wont to the window. The outlook was miserable and disheartening. The wind had completely fallen, and the rain too was beginning to cease. The country was transformed into a veritable sea of mud, and the sky, covered with low hanging clouds, had the same gray tint as the fields. The dull landscape was like a huge hole, in which lay scattered, like nameless rubbish, muddy trees, blackened houses, and rounded hills, whose rough edges had been worn away by the rain. It seemed as if a furious hand had kneaded up the entire plain into a filthy mixture of putrid water and brown clay. There was something so equivocal, so underhand, in the dirty appearance of the wan lustreless daylight which was struggling for existence over this foul immensity, that it filled the beholder with disgust.

This cloudy daybreak of a winter’s morning is a painful hour for people who have spent a sleepless night. William gazed upon the dull horizon in a stupor of grief. He was cold, he was coming to his senses, and he felt a discomfort both of body and mind. He seemed as if he had been beaten and had hardly recovered consciousness. Madeleine, weary, dispirited, and shivering like himself, came to look out too. She could not restrain a cry of distress as she saw everything so muddy.

“What dirt!” she murmured.

“There has been a lot of rain,” remarked William, hardly knowing what he said.

After a short silence, during which they continued to stand by the window, Madeleine exclaimed:

“Look, the wind has broken a tree in our garden — The earth has run down into the walks from the borders — You might think it was a cemetery.”

“It is the rain which has ruined everything,” replied her husband, in his monotonous tone.

They dropped the little muslin curtains which they had lifted up, unable to
heap
the sight of such a sink any longer.

A sudden shiver came over them, and they went towards the fire. The daylight had become clearer, and their room seemed miserable, filled as it was with the gloomy rays from the outside. They had never seen it in this sad state. They felt an oppression at the heart, for they knew that this feeling of disgust and wretchedness proceeded not only from the dull sky, but also from their own misery, and from the sudden collapse of their happiness. The gloomy future gave a taste of bitterness to the present, and spoiled the pleasures of the past. They thought:
“
We did wrong to come here; we ought to have fled for refuge to some strange room where we should not have found the cruel living memory of our former love. If this bed where we have slept, if these chairs in which we have sat, no longer seem to us to be possessed of the warmth of former days, it is because our bodies themselves have turned them cold. Everything is dead in us.”

Yet they were becoming more reconciled to their fate. Madeleine had drawn her dressing gown over her shoulders, and William was forgetting his nightmares and coming back to a calmer estimate of real life. In his frightful dreams when he had been a prey to the excitement of that semi-consciousness which magnifies the smallest sufferings, he had been carried away by horrible thoughts, thoughts that overstepped the bounds of possibility and wandered into the region of infamous suppositions. Now, the cool morning air was lifting him out of his stupor, and his mind, now somewhat relieved, was being freed of its visions. He was being brought to his senses by the ordinary course of events. He no longer saw Madeleine in James’s arms, he no longer tortured his mind by evoking the spectacle of this strange adultery which locked his wife and friend in such a close embrace. Each detail was fading in the perspective, and the drama was losing its painful reality. He saw the lovers in a, vague way, in the distant past, hut they were too far off to cause his flesh to revolt. From this time his position seemed acceptable; he could fall back into the ordinary course of existence, he could live again with Madeleine as her husband, beloved by her, and ready to fight in order to keep her in his possession. He still suffered from the terrible blow which had almost driven them both mad, but the first crushing pain was passing away. His frozen heart was thawing and he was passing with ease over obstacles which had at first seemed odious and insurmountable.

Thus he began to hope again. He looked with sad smiles at Madeleine, in whom a similar change was taking place. Still there was at her heart a heavy lump which stifled her and which she could not get rid of. She encouraged herself to thoughts of hope, but there was always this lump to bar the way. It was like a fatal weight which was to remain in her breast till it caused her death. The smiles which she gave William resembled the smiles of a poor invalid who feels the hand of death already on her face and is yet unwilling to distress those around her.

They sat a part of the morning before the fire chatting about one thing and another. They avoided all mention of their yet raw wounds, putting off till later on the trouble of coming to a decision. For the moment, they wished simply, to give a little breathing space to their sufferings. In the middle of their chat, William had a sudden inspiration. The day before, Lucy’s nurse had come to look for the little child at La. Noiraude; she was going to begin the baking for the farm, and this amused the girl, who was a little glutton in the way of cake. As a rule, she never missed being in at this event. Her father, thinking that she was doubtless still there, close by them, felt an ardent wish to see her, and to place her between Madeleine and himself, as an earnest of peace. In his anguish, he had forgotten their child, and he felt a great comfort in looking upon her again as a living bond which united them to each other. Was she not a pledge of the eternity of their union? One of her smiles would suffice to heal their wounds, and to prove to them that nothing in the world could separate them.

“Madeleine,” he said, “you ought to go and look for Lucy at the farm — She might spend the day with us.”

His young wife saw his meaning. She too had not given a thought to her daughter, and her mere name had caused her a sensation of the profoundest joy. She was a mother, and she would forget everything, even this weight which was stifling her.

“You are right,” she answered. “Besides, we can’t spend the day without eating — We will have a breakfast of eggs and milk.”

She laughed, as if they were going to have a nice party. She was saved, she thought. Two minutes were enough for her to put on warmer clothes; she slipped on a skirt, threw a shawl over her shoulders, and ran off to the farm. Meanwhile, William drew a little table up to the fire and threw a cloth over it. These preparations for a tête-à-tête breakfast with his wife, carried him back to their happy love-days, when she used to offer him some light refreshment in her little house. The room appeared to re-assume its former modest charms; it was secluded, warn, and filled with perfume. He forgot the dirt outside, telling himself that they were going to be quite warm, that they would spend a delightful day, far from the world, alone with their dear Lucy. Even the grey gloomy morning seemed to add to his pleasure.

Madeleine was a long time away, but at last she came back. William went down to meet her and to relieve her of the milk and bread with which she was loaded. Little Lucy herself was carrying a large piece of cake and holding it with all her might close to her breast The child was then three and a half years old. She was very tall for her age, and her thick short limbs made her look like a country girl, who had shot up without restraint in the open air. Fair like her mother, she smiled with childish grace, and this happy smile gave a softened expression to her face, otherwise inclined to be harsh. Precociously intelligent, she chattered for days together, already mimicking fine, folks, and making requests and putting questions which made her parents weep with laughter. When she saw her father at the foot of the stairs, she shouted:

“Take me, carry me upstairs.”

She would not let go her cake, and did not venture to climb the steps without clinging to the balustrade. William took her in his arms, with smiles and fond looks, delighted to have her with him. This little warm body leaning against his shoulder, sent his blood glowing to his heart.