Complete Works of Emile Zola (146 page)

“
How peaceful everything is here,” William continued in a gentle tone. “We cannot hear a sound, and we might think ourselves in some happy solitude. Might we not?
You could fancy we were in one of those old monasteries where men buried themselves for a whole lifetime, listening to the monotonous sound of the bell. This deserted house ought to appease the fevers of the heart. Don’t you feel more tranquil, Madeleine, since we have been breathing the chilly air of this room?”

His young wife was thinking of the pigeon-cote of red bricks and the yellow door of the stable.

“It seems to me,” she murmured “as if I had seen a yard somewhere like the one belonging to this inn — I don’t know now — It must have been a long time ago.”

She stopped, full of uneasy thoughts, as if she had dreaded to ransack her memory. Her husband smiled slightly, and said in his tender voice:

“You are asleep and dreaming, Madeleine. Cheer up now, we are in our solitude. Ever since yesterday, I have been dreaming of exiling ourselves like this, of getting away from the world. This room is somewhat cheerless, but it has for us a great charm: it speaks to us but of the present, and soothes us with its bareness and its shabbiness. I congratulate myself on having thought of stopping on the way. To-morrow we shall have found our happiness again. Cheer up, Madeleine.’’

She shook her head and stammered, without taking her eyes from the fire:

“I don’t know what is the matter with me. I feel as if I were going to choke, and strangely uncomfortable. I have been frightened, you see, and think myself not out of danger yet.”

William pressed her more affectionately, and the gaze, which he fixed on his wife’s frightened face, became exquisitely tender.

“What are you afraid of?” he continued. “Are you not in my arms? No one here can come to dismay us. Oh! what a joy I feel in telling myself that not a being on earth knows that we are in this room. To be forgotten by all, to live on like this in a hidden retreat, to be able to say that not a creature, friend or foe, can come and knock at our door, is not this the supreme peace we have need of? I have always dreamed of living in the desert, and many a time have I sought in the country to find some quiet corner in which to bury myself. When I could see no more country people or farms, when I found myself alone beneath the sky, certain of being noticed by no passer-by, I used to feel sad, sad unto death; still my sadness was pleasant to me, and kept me there for hours. And I am here with you, Madeleine, as I used to be alone in the fields in days gone by. Smile on me again with your kind affectionate smile.” She shook her head afresh, putting her hand to her brow, as if to dispel the secret disturbing memories that kept her so cold and dejected. William continued:

“
I have always had a dislike and a dread of the world, that world which is capable of nothing but harm. As we came away from Véteuil, I had an idea of going to Paris so that the bustle of the street might deafen the noise of our sufferings: but how much more beneficial the calm of this solitude is! — In this room there are only two beings who love one another. Look, I hold you in my arms, and I can forget and forgive everything. There is no one here to prevent me with his deriding glances from pressing you to my heart, nobody to jeer at the surrender which I make you of my whole being. I want our love to be elevated far above the vulgar and conventional love of the crowd, and I desire our affection to be absolute, with no anxious thought about the miseries and shames of this lower world. What has the past to do with us, and why need we be concerned about harm from without? It is enough that we love one another, that we live in each other’s embraces, absorbed in ourselves, and never seeing what is passing around us. So long as a corner remains in which we can hide ourselves, so long shall we be allowed to look for and find happiness. Let us tell ourselves that we no longer know anybody, that we are alone on the earth, without relations, without child, without friends, and let us bury ourselves in the thought of our solitary affection. We are now the only people in the world, Madeleine, and I give myself up entirely to you: I am happy in my weakness, and in telling myself that I love you still — You have made my life disconsolate, and I love you, Madeleine — “

His heart had gradually warmed to his words. His voice, tender and earnest, had the fervour of prayer: it had flowed on; now with sudden humility, now with a gentle penetrating vibration. He was in one of those hours of reaction when the heart melts and overflows after a long period of firm purpose. As he said, he loved solitude because it allowed him to abandon himself to his want of moral force without fear of interruption. If Madeleine had then returned his look of adoration, the weakness of his passion would have impelled him, perhaps, even to fall down on his knee3 before her. He felt a strange delight, after his sufferings of the previous day, in surrendering himself to the arms of this woman, far from every prying eye. This dream that he continually indulged in, of becoming entirely absorbed in her, of forgetting the rest of the world on her bosom, this vision of an existence of affection and repose was the eternal cry of his nervous tender nature, that had been hurt at each moment by the rude shocks of life.

Slowly yet surely, Madeleine felt herself comforted by the murmur of affection and the warm embraces of her, husband. Her grey eyes grew brighter, and her lips lost their harsh contraction and pale hue. Still she did not smile on William. She simply felt pervaded with great peacefulness at seeing herself loved with such absolute faith. She ceased to stare at the fire and turned her head towards him. When their looks had met, he continued with greater tenderness.

“
If yon wish it, Madeleine, we will go on like this along the roads, travelling from day to day, sleeping where fate leads us to, and setting off again next day for the unknown. We will leave France, and make short journeys toward the countries of sunshine and pure air. And, in this continual change of landscape, we shall feel ourselves more alone, and more united. Nobody will know us, and not a single being will have the right to speak to us. We should never sleep more than a night in the inns we found

by the road-side; our love could have no fixed abode there, and we should isolate ourselves from the whole world only to cling more closely to each other. I dream of exile, Madeleine, of an exile when I should be permitted to live on your breast, I should desire to take no one but you, to feel myself battered with the wind and to make myself a pillow on your bosom, where the storm had driven me. Nothing would exist for me but that fair bosom on which I should listen to the beating of your heart. Then when we were lost among a people whose language we knew not, we should hear nothing but our own talk, and we could look on the passers-by as deaf and dumb animals; then should we be isolated indeed, we should pass through the crowds without thinking of the creatures that formed it, just as, during our walks in the days gone by, we passed with careless step through the flocks of sheep that were browsing on the stubble. And we should go on like this for ever. Do you consent, Madeleine?”

A smile had gradually risen to his young wife’s lips. The rigidity of her being was relaxing, and she was surrendering herself freely to William’s caresses. She had passed one arm round his neck and was looking at him with a softened expression.

“What a child you are!” she murmured.
“
You are awake and yet dreaming, my dear, and we should be tired in a week of this journey that you are proposing to me. Why not get one of those caravans made at once that the gypsies have?”

And a slight and tender joking smile passed over her face. William would perhaps have been annoyed if she had not accompanied this smile with a kiss. He shook his head gently and continued:

“It is true, I am a child, Madeleine, but children can love. I feel that solitude is now necessary to our happiness. You speak of gipsies, these gipsies are happy people, who live in the sunshine, and I envied them more than once when I was at school. On the days when we were allowed to go out, I nearly always used to see bands of them just outside the town camped on a waste bit of ground, where the wheelwrights of the neighbourhood had their wood yards. I used to amuse myself by running along the long beams laid on the ground, watching the gipsies as they boiled their pots. The children rolled about on the ground, the men and the women had odd faces, and the interior of the caravans, into which I sought to pry, seemed to me like a world of fantastical objects. And I would stay there, walking round these people, and opening wide my inquisitive and startled eyes. I still felt on my shoulders the bruises which my comrades had given me with their fists the day before, and I would dream sometimes of going far far away in one of these travelling houses. I would say to myself: if they beat me again this week I will go off next Sunday with the gipsies, and I will beg them to take me away into the heart of some country where I shall be free from blows. My childish imagination delighted in this dream of being continually on the move in the open air. But I never dared. Don’t make light of me, Madeleine.”

She was still smiling and giving a look of encouragement to her husband as he thus unbosomed himself. This childish talk calmed her and made her forget for a moment the drama which was torturing both their minds.

“I must tell you,” William continued cheerfully, “that I was a singularly wild child. The blows had made me gloomy and insociable. At night, in the dormitory, when I could not sleep, I could see, when I shut my eyes, little nooks of landscape and strange solitary places, confusedly jumbled together in my head, and these I arranged afterwards, bit by bit, as my shy and tender nature would have them. I generally saw deep valleys filled with rocks; down below at the bottom of the black gorges roared angry torrents; on each side rose steep grey hills towards a sky of cloudless blue, where eagles soared on steady wing; and amongst the enormous blocks at the edge of the abyss I would place a white flag-stone where I saw myself in thought, seated and dead as it were, in the midst of this desolation and unsheltered glare. At other times my reveries were of a gentler nature: I would create a tiny island, situated in the middle of a broad and tranquil river; I could hardly distinguish the distant banks which were like two green belts lost in the mist; the sky was of a pale grey, and the poplars of my island rose up straight in the white mist from the water; then I saw myself reclining on the soft grass, lulled by the subdued and continual murmur of the river, and refreshed by the rich breath of this moist soil. These landscapes which I evoked and which I delighted to modify incessantly, taking away a rock, or adding a tree, used to appear to me with singular clearness; they consoled me and transported me into unknown countries where I thought I lived a whole life of silence and peace. When I opened my eyes, when everything faded away and I found myself again in the gloomy dormitory lighted by the pale rays of a night lamp, my heart felt oppressed with anguish, and I listened to the breathing of my comrades, dreading to see them get up and come and beat me as a punishment for having escaped them in my dreams.” He stopped to return to Madeleine the kisses that she was bestowing on his brow. She was touched by the story of the sufferings of his youth. In this hour when he was opening to her his heart, she could fathom the gentleness of this nervous constitution, and she solemnly swore to love William as he deserved, with refined and absolute affection.

“Later on,” he continued, “when I felt the inclination to run away with these gipsies, I was simply yielding to the hope of finding along the roads the landscapes which I had seen in my dream. I firmly believed that I should discover them somewhere, and I fancied that I had pictured them as they really existed. It was doubtless some good angel who had revealed them to me, for I scorned the idea of having been able to create them entirely, and I should really have felt deeply troubled, if it had been proved to me that they had only existed in my brain. They beckoned to me, they called me to go and repose amongst them, and promised me a life of eternal peace.” He stopped again, hesitating, not venturing to continue. Then with a timid smile, with the embarrassed look’ of an upgrown man who is confessing some childish folly, he murmured:

“And shall I tell you, Madeleine? I still believe that they exist, those landscapes where I have spent so many nights of my childhood. During the day I was a martyr, and I looked on the cold walls of the school with the despair of a prisoner shut up in the room where he is to be tortured; but at night, I wandered over the fields and revelled in the free air, tasting a heart-felt pleasure in no longer seeing the uplifted fist ready to fall on my head. I lived two lives, each as real as the other. No, Madeleine, my dreams cannot have deceived me. If we search, we shall find somewhere on earth, my gorge filled with rocks, and my island situated in the middle of a broad and tranquil river. And this, Madeleine, is why I wish to go where chance may lead us, convinced that I shall find some day the solitudes I have dreamed of. Oh! if you know how pleasant and peaceful they were in my dreams. There we should repose in happy rest, there we should live for ever far from the world, far from everything that has harmed us. It would be life transformed into a dream. Are you willing for us to start in search of these happy nooks? I shall know them and say to you: ‘It’s here that we must love each other.’ And don’t laugh, Madeleine: they do exist, for I have seen them.” His young wife was not laughing now. Her eyes were filling with tears, and her lips were quivering with emotion.

William’s words, and the gentle murmur which he was pouring into her ear were making her weep. How he loved her, and what depth of ineffable tenderness she found in his heart! Unconsciously the thought that she could not give herself to him entirely and without mental reservation redoubled her emotion; but she did not think then that it was only the soothing effect of these words falling one by one on her heart that she was feeling. She kissed her husband’s face from time to time as he spoke, and surrendered herself to his arms, yielding to his embraces and clasping him closely round the neck. The burning logs, which threw off large yellow flames, cast on them a warm light. And, behind them, the huge strange room was sunk in repose.