Complete Works of Emile Zola (145 page)

As thus he mused on the new life they were going to live in Paris, Guillaume felt Madeleine’s body pour more and more warmth into his. Under the grey rug their feet interlaced, and this touch of her young body counted for much in the dream of peace and affection which once again he was building up. Though he did not know it, his hopes were born of his enjoyment at finding her so close to him. She kept him warm, while their vehicle rolled on incessantly through the icy night, lost in the great peace of winter.

They were drawing near Mantes, and had not uttered a word since Véteuil, each lost in reverie, eyes far-off on the sheets of white luminosity which the moon spread over the upturned land about them. Passing a house which bordered the road, a dog suddenly began barking, so miserably that a shiver passed through Madeleine.

“Asleep, darling?” Guillaume asked her.

“Yes,” she murmured, feeling that her long meditative silence must have been hard for him to bear. “That dog woke me.... Where are we?”

With his hand he pointed to the outline of roofs, bluish on the horizon.

“That’s Mantes,” he said, and flicked his whip at the horse. In the same instant, a woman who had been sheltering behind a hedge suddenly ran down to the road and made towards the brougham. When she reached it, she clung to one of the head-lamps and thus followed beside it, at the run, shouting something confused, which they could not hear, for the noise of the wheels.

“It’s a beggar,” said Madeleine, leaning out and seeing how poorly the woman was dressed.

Guillaume tossed down five francs. The woman caught the coin in flight, but still did not at once let go of the lamp. When Madeleine had leant out, she had gasped, and now was staring, strangely persistent.

“Let go there!” Guillaume shouted to her. He felt Madeleine shiver under the poor creature’s stare. And when the woman at last did let go, he turned to his wife to assure her it was indeed only a beggar.

“I’m not afraid,” said Madeleine. Yet she was still shaking. “But whyever did she stare at me so? I could not see her face because of those rags round her throat. It was an elderly woman, wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” he said. “Somebody told me something the other day about a girl from these parts who went to Paris to make her fortune and came back recently, half crazy.... This may be her.”

“How old would she be?”

“Really, I don’t know.... Why, do you think she knows us? She was only hoping to get another five-franc piece.”

Madeleine said no more, yet still felt vaguely uncomfortable about the way the beggar had stared at her, and she leant back to look behind them, and then she saw the beggar-woman was still running behind them. This filled her with real terror, but she had not the courage to talk to Guillaume about the woman again.

The brougham was now entering Mantes. Guillaume had a pleasant idea which had just come to him. It had just struck eleven, and he was telling himself that they could hardly get to Paris before daybreak. Thought of the long night journey ahead of them had begun to appal him. Perhaps it would be wiser to put up in Mantes for the night. When this occurred to him, he was attracted at once by the idea, particularly because he had a profound desire now to possess Madeleine deep in some totally fresh retreat. During the preceding night, when they were both suffering from tortures in their cottage so close to
Noiraude
, he had longed for a totally unknown room in which they might lie together free from all traces of the past. This dream had come to him again on the empty highroad, and now how easy to realize it! He had only to knock on the door of the first inn they came to, and he would find that commonplace bedroom, that chance apartment in which he might try to find oblivion. Thus the idea of spending the night at Mantes which had first sprung from notions of prudence became a precious desire.

“What do you say to the idea of putting up here?” he suddenly asked her. “You must be tired, and we will start off again to-morrow morning.”

His young wife fancied that she could still hear the steps of the poor beggar running after the gig, and she jumped eagerly at William’s proposal.

“Yes, yes,” she replied, “let us stay the night here. I am dying of sleep.”

Then William tried to find his whereabouts. He knew of a vast inn close by the gates of Mantes where he was certain to find room. This inn, known as the “Big Stag,” had had its days of celebrity among the waggoners and commercial travellers, before the making of the railway. It was almost like a little village, with its stables, sheds, yards, and its three blocks of building of unequal height. Traversed by endless passages, intersected by innumerable staircases connecting the different stories in all sorts of odd places, it used to be filled, in days gone by, with the life of a little world of travellers. To-day, it was nearly always empty. The proprietor had tried to turn it into a hotel, fitted up after the modem fashion, but he had only succeeded in making the furniture of his bedrooms and sitting-rooms perfectly ridiculous. He saw all his old customers leave him and go to take up their quarters with one of his fellow landlords, who had just built, near the station, a sort of furnished house decorated with mirrors and cheap clocks, after the Paris fashion.

William had an instinctive liking for unpretentious and solitary houses, so he made for the Big Stag. Next day was market day, and the people in the inn had not yet gone to bed. A waiter came and threw the door that led into the principal yard wide open. William got down in order to lead his horse in himself by the rein. The waiter had gone to look for a candle and the key of a bedroom, as the new-comers had expressed their wish to retire at once. Madeleine did not alight till they were in the yard, and she hardly stayed there two minutes. Still shaken by the jerks of the gig, and trembling at their adventure on the road, she looked round her with an air of uneasiness. She thought she recognised this strange house to which her husband was bringing her. In front of her rose a pigeon-cote built of red bricks, which she must have seen somewhere; and there was, too, a stable door, painted yellow, which seemed au old acquaintance. But her weariness and her vague feeling of terror made her recollections very confused, and it would have been impossible for her to make a vigorous appeal to her memory. These black walls, these gloomy masses of building, lit up by white patches of moonlight, assumed in the night a curious, sad appearance, and she felt certain that she was looking on them for the first time. The stable door and the pigeon-cote astonished her, even frightened her by their existence in a place where she never remembered having been before. Yet, it was only a flash, a rapid sensation of uneasiness which redoubled her uncomfortable feeling, and her secret fears.

The waiter came back in haste and led the travellers up a labyrinth of little staircases, whose well-worn steps leaned in an alarming fashion. He made excuses and said that if the gentleman and his wife had come in on the kitchen side they could have got to their room by the principal staircase. Madeleine was still looking round her, but she recognised nothing in this maze of floors and passages.

At last the waiter opened a door. He thought he must make excuses again. “This room looks into the yard,” he said, “but it was quite ready, and you seemed so anxious to retire at once — Besides, it is a good bed.”

“All right,” replied William, “only let us have a fire, for it is enough to freeze one here.”

The waiter put a few logs in the grate, and there was a supply of wood in the comer. Madeleine and William walked up and down the room somewhat impatiently, waiting for him to go. The young wife had taken off her hat and the handkerchief which she had tied round her neck. When the waiter, who had been betiding down by the fire and noisily blowing the flame with his mouth, got up, he suddenly stopped in front of her, examining, with surprise, her face lit up by the full light of the candle. Madeleine had her eyes fixed on the tips of her boots, which she was holding out to the fire, consequently she did not notice his astonishment. He gave a sort of knowing smile and looked at William with a roguish expression.

“Take good care of my horse,” said the latter, dismissing him: “I shall come down, I daresay, before going to bed, to see if he has everything he wants.”

The room in which the young couple were going to spend the night was a spacious, square apartment. The paper on the walls seemed to have lost its colour ages ago; it was now turning a dingy
grey,
and it was almost impossible to trace the faded roses with which it must have been decorated. There was a big crack in the ceiling: this crack, which was oozing with damp, was bordered with rust-coloured spots, and the bare cold plaster was thus divided, from one end to the other, by a yellow-looking streak. The room was paved, too, with broad tiles painted blood red. As for the furniture, it consisted of a pot-bellied chest of drawers, with brass knobs, a huge wardrobe, a bed, remarkably narrow for two persons, a round table and a few chairs. The bed and the windows were hung with curtains of blue cotton material, fringed with a garland of white flowers. On the bare marble top of the drawers, stood a clock made of blown glass, one of those childish wonders which country people hand down, with precious care, from father to son: this clock represented a mansion all dotted with windows, and adorned with galleries and balconies, and through the windows one could see, in the interior, parlours and drawingrooms in which little dolls lay reclining on sofas. But all the objects of luxury had been reserved for the decoration of the chimney-piece. Here were displayed two bouquets of artificial flowers, carefully placed under glass globes, then a dozen or so of teacups all of different patterns, arranged in perfect order on the edge of the shelf, and in the centre, between the bouquets, rose a singular construction, a sort of monument made of those boxes won at fairs, with pink shepherds and shepherdesses on the lid; there were quite a dozen of them, of different shapes and sizes, the little ones on the bigger, very skilfully arranged one above the other, so as to form a kind of tomb of fantastical architecture. The fine arts were represented, too, in the room by a series of pictures relating the story of Pyramus and Thisbe; framed with narrow black rods and covered with glass all full of green knots; these pictures, eight in number, went right round the room, dotting the walls with yellow, blue, and red spots: the stiff, glaring colours, laid on in big daubs, set off the pale tints of the paper in a curious fashion, while the childish simplicity of the drawing smacked of the country design: at the bottom of each picture was a long legend, and it would have taken a good hour to read the whole story.

This room, which the inn-keeper had fancied he was making so comfortable by spreading a strip of carpet under the round table, had that indefinable odour so peculiar to all furnished hotels. It smelled close and fusty, and there was a lurking perfume of old linen, cast-off clothes, and damp dust. Huge, shabby, and chilly, it resembled a public-room where the whole world might have come and no one left a trace of his presence or his habits; it had the dreary cheerlessness, the vulgar nakedness of a barrack sleeping-room. Young and old, men and women had slept for a night in this narrow bed which remained as cold as a stone seat in a porch. A world of sorrow, or a world of joy had perhaps lived here for a few hours, but the room had preserved no trace of the tears and laughter that must have peopled it Its vulgarity, its gloom, and its silence were full of a sort of ashamed sadness, a sadness that pervades the little rooms of wretched prostitutes into which enter the kisses of a whole neighbourhood. Au inquisitive searcher might have found at the bottom of one of the cups on the mantelpiece a stick of cosmetic, forgotten by some young spark of a commercial traveller, and behind another cup a few hair pins which had fastened up the chignon of some lady from a gay neighbourhood in Paris, who had been led astray in Mantes.

William had dreamed of a more genial solitude, and a more fitting retreat. He was distressed for a moment at the sight of this shabby room; but there was no choice, and, besides, he had found what he wanted, a nook unknown to the world, where no one could come to disturb his peace. He gradually recovered from his dejection, and smiled at last as he thought that they had left La Noiraude to come and sleep in such a hole. He had seated himself by the fire and drew Madeleine on his knees as she sat holding out her feet to the flame, absorbed in thought, and seeing nothing around her.

“You are weary, my poor Madeleine?” be asked, in an endearing tone.

“No,” she replied. “I felt chilly as we were coming up the steps, and I am just going to warm my feet before getting into bed.”

She was shivering, and thinking still, in spite of herself, of the poor creature who had followed their conveyance.

“You are not very angry with me for having brought you here, are you?” asked William again. “We shall sleep very badly, I daresay, but we will start off early to-morrow morning — I feel pretty comfortable myself in this room. Are you not happy at the peaceful calm and the still silence that surrounds us?”

She did not answer but whispered:

“
That woman frightened me just now on the road. She stared at me with such an ill-natured expression.”

“Good gracious! what a child you are!” exclaimed her husband. “You were afraid of Geneviève, and now it is a poor beggar that terrifies you. And yet, you are not usually nervous. Come now, that woman is quietly sleeping by some ditch-side.”

“You are mistaken, William. She followed us, and I thought I saw her come into the inn at the same time as ourselves.”

“Ah well! She came to ask to be allowed to sleep in the stable. - Come now, calm yourself, Madeleine, and consider that we are alone, separated from the world, in each other’s arms.”

He had clasped his hands round her waist, and was holding her closely to his breast. But she sat gloomily and lifeless in his embrace, watching the logs burn with an anxious expression, and giving no reply to the look of adoration that he was fixing on her. The flames cast a red gleam on them both, and the candle, set on a corner of the drawers, shed only a speck of flickering light in the vast damp room.