Complete Works of Emile Zola (150 page)

He had lost all hope, and wished simply to isolate himself in the darkness and silence of the night; it seemed to him that he would suffer leas when the candle was blown out, and he was in bed, no longer listening to Madeleine’s grating voice. He went to the bedside, drew aside the curtains, and turned down a corner of the clothes. Madeleine, who was still leaning against the big wardrobe, watched him do this with a strange expression on her face. When the quilt was turned down and she saw the dazzling whiteness of the sheets, she said:

“I shall not go to bed. I will never sleep there with you.”

He turned round in surprise, not understanding the reason of this fresh outbreak of resistance.

“
I have not told you,” she continued, “that I have already occupied this room with James — I have slept there in his arms.”

And she pointed to the bed with a significant gesture. William fell back, and came and sat down on the table again. He uttered not a word, for this time he was utterly prostrate, and surrendered himself to the will of fate, for it seemed as if everything was crushing him more cruelly than he could bear.

“You must not be vexed with me if I am speaking the truth,” replied Madeleine, harshly. “I am sparing you a feeling of shame. You refuse, don’t you, to embrace me in the bed where I have already slept in James’s arms? We should have horrible dreams, and, perhaps, I should die of anguish.”

The name of her first lover, which she had just mentioned for the second time, brought her mind back to the recent interview. Her brain was wandering, and her thoughts only came in sudden rushes.

“He was with me just now,” she said. “He jeered and insulted me. I am, in his eyes, a poor, abandoned woman, an abandoned woman whom he has the right to abuse. He does not know that I am respected now, and he has never seen me leaning on your arm — One moment, I wished to confess the truth to him. And I could not — Do you wish to know why I could not, and why I let him laugh, and speak familiarly to me? No, I can’t tell you this — Oh! how carefully I ought to conceal it from you. But you must know all, and then you will not speak to me again of finding a remedy for all this sorrow — This man suspected me of having dragged a fresh lover into this room in order to taste a vile pleasure in evoking the past.”

William had ceased to shudder, for he was growing enfeebled beneath all these blows.

“Oh, I know this room well,” murmured Madeleine, after a short silence.

She came away from the wardrobe against which she had been leaning since the beginning of the scene, and stepped forward into the middle of the room. Here, full of mute rage, her neck swollen with suppressed violence, she began to stare slowly round with terrible fixedness. William, who had raised his head on hearing her footsteps, was alarmed by the expression of her eyes, and could not help saying:

“You frighten me, Madeleine; don’t look at the walls like that.”

She shook her head, and continued to turn round where she stood, examining each object at a distance.

“I know them, I know them all,” she repeated in a low sing-song voice. “Oh! my poor head is splitting. You must forgive me, William, you must. The words came to my lips, in spite of myself; I should like to keep them back, but I feel them slipping out. I am filled with the memory of the past — It is a frightful thing not to be able to forget — Oh! for mercy’s sake, kill my thoughts, kill my thoughts!”

She had raised her voice, and was shouting now:

“Oh! how I should like to be able to think no more, to be dead, or to be alive and mad! — Oh! to lose one’s memory, to exist like a stone, to listen no longer to the frightful noise of the thoughts of my brain! — All this is escaping me in spite of all I can do; my thoughts torture me without respite, they flow through my body with the blood of my veins, and I can hear them vibrating at the tips of each of my fingers — Forgive me, William, I cannot keep silent.”

She took a few strides with such a wild expression that her husband thought she was really going mad. He stretched out his hands, calling her by her name and endeavouring to keep her back.

“Madeleine, Madeleine,” he said in a beseeching tone.

But she paid no heed. She had approached the wall, which fronted the fire place, and was still repeating:

“Oh! that I could think no longer, for my thoughts are horrible, and I am expressing them aloud — I know everything here.”

And she raised her eyes and gazed on the wall before her. The reappearance of James, of that man whose presence filled her with such deep emotion, had brought about in her a crisis both of body and mind; this crisis had gone on increasing, and now it was exciting her nature and producing on her a singular hallucination. The young wife, forgetting the presence of her husband, and filled with the memory of the past, thought herself back again in the days gone by; a feverish agitation had totally upset her usually calm being, and the smallest objects that surrounded her produced on her a keen, unbearable sensation which made her give utterance to each of her impressions in words and exclamations. She was living again the hours that she had spent in this place with James, and, as she had said, she was living them aloud, in spite of herself, as if she had been alone.

The blazing fire threw a bright red light on the walls. William’s figure alone, as he still sat on the table, threw a shadow, which rose, black and colossal, from the floor to the ceiling; all the rest of the room, even the smallest corners, was brightly lit up by the shine. The bed, half exposed where the clothes had been turned down, lay white and inviting in the ruddy warmth from the fire, the angles and edges of the furniture shone with bright threads of light, and little miniature flames danced on the panels: the clear rays from the hearth brought out the harsh, glaring tones of the pictures, the red and yellow garments of Pyramus and Thisbe, stained the faded paper, with splashes of blood and gold, and the glass clock and the frail castle were illuminated from cellar to attic, as if the little dolls that lay reclining in the rooms had been holding a merry festival.

And in this clear brightness, Madeleine was going along in fits and starts by the side of the walls, her brown travelling dress rustling against the furniture, her face deathly pale, and her hair as red as if it were ablaze. She was examining one by one the pictures that related the unfortunate love-story of Pyramus and Thisbe.

“There ought to be eight,” she said,
“
I counted them with James, and I stood up on a chair, and read him the inscription at the bottom of each picture. These little narratives seemed to him very funny, and he laughed at the bad grammar and the ridiculous wording of the sentences — I remember that I was annoyed at the way he poked fun at them, for I thought these artless love-stories full of charming simplicity — Ah! there is the wall that separated the lovers, and the crack through which they confided to each other their affection. Is it not delightful, that wall full of chinks, that obstacle which could not keep two hearts asunder? And then what a terrible ending! Here is the picture where Thisbe finds Pyramus bathed in blood: the young fellow thought that his loved one had just been devoured by a lioness; he has stabbed himself, and Thisbe, finding him lying dead on the ground, stabs herself too, and falls on his body to die — I should like to die like that — James laughed a
t
me. ‘If you were to find me dead,’ I asked him, ‘what would you do?’ He came and took me in his arms, and kissed me, laughing louder than before, and answering: ‘I would kiss you like that, on the lips, to bring you to life again.’”

William rose, full of feverish excitement and secret irritation. The thoughts and the sights which his wife was bringing before his eyes caused him a feeling of unbearable anguish, and he would have wished to stop her mouth. He took her by the wrists, and drew her into the middle of the room, shouting:

“Hold your tongue, hold your tongue. You are forgetting that I am here. You are too cruel, Madeleine.”

But she escaped from him, and ran towards the window.

“I remember,” she said, drawing aside one of the little muslin curtains, “this window looks into the yard. Oh! I recognise everything again, one streak of moonlight is enough — There is the pigeon-cote built of red bricks: in the evening, I used to stand with James watching the flights of pigeons coming back home, and stopping for a moment, on the edges of the roof, to plume their feathers, before disappearing one by one through the narrow round holes; they used to utter little plaintive coos and peck one another — and that is the yellow door of the stable which used to stand wide open; we could hear the horses breathing, and see the hens coming out cackling and scratching at the bits of straw they had found inside. It seems to me as if it were yesterday. I had had to stay in bed for the first two days, because I was very unwell. Then, when I was able to get up, I came to this window. I thought this outlook of walls and roofs very melancholy, but I love animals, and I amused myself for hours together by watching the greedy habits of the hens, and the billing and cooing of the pigeons. James smoked all the time, and walked up and down the room. When I called him with shouts of laughter to come and see a chicken running off with a worm in its beak, followed by the others, all eager to share the dainty morsel, he would come and bend down to put his arm round my waist — he had a way of kissing me on the neck, light, quick kisses, so as to imitate with his lips, which hardly touched me, the cackling of the chickens. ‘I am pretending to be a young chicken,’ he would say jokingly.”

“Hold your tongue, hold your tongue,” shouted William, violently.

Madeleine had; come away from the window, and was standing by the bed, staring at it, with a strange expression on her face.

“It was summer time,” she went on in a lower voice, “and the nights were very hot. The first two days, James slept on the floor, on a mattress. When my illness had passed away, we put this mattress on to those I had slept on. At night, when we lay down, we found the bed full of lumps, and James pretended, in fun, that if we were to put twenty mattresses one on the top of the other we should not sleep any softer. We left the window partly open, and drew these blue cotton curtains aside, so as to get a breath of air. They are just the same as they were, and I see a rent there, that I made with a hair-pin. I was strong even then, and James was no weakling, and the bed seemed very narrow.”

William, beside himself with exasperation, came and planted himself between Madeleine and the bed. He pushed her towards the fire-place, with an almost unconquerable longing to seize her by the throat, and strike her on the mouth, to reduce her to silence.

“She is going mad,” he stammered, “and yet I cannot beat her.”

The young wife stepped backwards to the table, looking on her husband’s pale face with a stupefied expression. When she felt herself touching it, she suddenly turned round, and began to inspect it, throwing the light of the candle on to the greasy wood, and examining every spot that she noticed.

“
Stay, stay,” she muttered, “I must have written something here — It was the day before we went away. James was reading, and I was feeling bored at my own thoughts. Then I dipped the tip of my little finger in an inkstand that there was, and I wrote something on the wood. Yes, I shall find it, for it was very distinct and cannot have been rubbed out — “

She turned round, and bent down so as to see better. After a search of a few seconds she raised a cry of triumph. “I knew,” she said, “stop, read this: — ‘I love James.’” While she was looking, William had been thinking of the gentlest way he could devise of keeping her silent. His pride, and the selfishness of his love, were so deeply hurt that he felt as if he could not help being brutal. His fists doubled in spite of himself, and his arms were preparing to strike. If he did not use blows, it was because he had not yet completely lost his head, and because the little reason he had left revolted at the thought of beating a woman. But when he heard Madeleine reading, “I love James,” and giving to the words the tender emphasis which she must have given in the days gone by, be drew himself up behind her with his fists in the air as if to hit her.

It was all done like a flash, yet his young wife, feeling a vague presentiment of what was happening, turned suddenly round and exclaimed:

“That’s right, beat me — I want you to — beat me.”

Had she not turned round, in all probability William would not have restrained his anger. This enormous chignon of red hair, and this bold neck where he fancied he could still sec the red imprints of James’s kisses, made him pitiless. But when he saw before him Madeleine’s pale and delicate face, he suddenly relented, and drew back with a gesture of the utmost despondency.

“Why do you hold back?
”
said his wife, “you see very well that I am mad and that you ought to treat me as a beast.”

Then she burst out sobbing, and this crisis of tears suddenly subdued her excitement. Since the beginning of this strange hallucination which had made her live over again the days of the past, she had felt her head filled with a flood of tears.

She would not have spoken if her sobs had come freely. Now that her anguish and anger were melting in hot tears, she gradually became more and more herself again; she felt her being relent, and she saw all the cruelty of her madness. It seemed as if she were just recovering from the effects of a nightmare during which she had related aloud the frightful sights with which her disordered brain had been haunted. And she became astonished and blamed herself for the words which had just escaped from her lips. Never would she be able to recall these words, never would her husband forget them. Henceforth there would be, between herself and William, the memories of this room, the living reality of an episode of her intimacy with James.

Full of despair, and terrified by the idea that she had avowed everything of her own accord, without any request for confession on the part of William, she went up to him with her hands clasped in the attitude of a suppliant. He had just dropped into a chair, hanging his head and hiding his face in his outspread hands.