Complete Works of Emile Zola (154 page)

Madeleine had no clear perception of her present state, no consciousness of the way in which she was relapsing into her former habits. She simply suffered at the thought of being possessed by James whom she was unable to drive from her thoughts. She was not in love with this man now, and would gladly have removed him from her breast, and yet she would always feel his embraces and his influence. It was like a continual violation of herself, against which her mind revolted and to which her body consented, finding no effort of will strong enough to deliver her from it. This struggle between her captive flesh and her desire to belong entirely to William was for her an unending cause of excitement and dread. When she had exerted every energy, when she believed that she had rid herself of the memory of her lover, and heard, at the moment when she thought she could at last surrender herself in peace to her husband’s kisses, this memory cry out in her being with a more tyrannical voice, she was seized with a despair without bounds, giving up every form of resistance, and allowing the past to prostitute her in the present The thought of being thus unceasingly at the beck of a man for whom she now felt no affection, the certainty that she loved William and that she deceived him against her will every hour, inspired her with a deep disgust of herself. She could not explain to herself the fatal physiological laws which placed her body out of reach of the action of her will; she could not fathom that secret quickening of her blood and nerves which had made her James’s wife for life; when she wished to reason with herself on the strangeness of her sensations, she always ended by accusing herself of monstrous tastes, as she saw her powerlessness to forget her lover and love her husband. Since she detested the one, and adored the other, why should she be subject to such painful pleasures in James’s imaginary embraces, and why could she not testify her affection freely to William When she asked herself this insoluble question, which contained the key to the trouble of her existence, which would have explained the enigma of the special malady from which she was suffering, she fancied she was a prey to some horrible and unknown disease, and told herself that Geneviève was right and that the devil must be in her body.

During the day, she still resisted the influence of James’s memory and succeeded in forgetting him. She no longer sat as she had done, prostrate with dejection, in the chimney corner: she moved about, finding work for her hands, and when there was nothing to be done, she would talk excitedly on any subject so as to deaden her thoughts by the sound of her, words. But at night she belonged entirely to her lover. Directly she began to drop asleep, directly her strength of will became relaxed in vague dreams, her body lost; all control of itself and relived the old love. Every night, she felt the horrible sensation coming on: scarcely had. a slight drowsiness come over her weary flesh, when she thought herself already falling into James’s arms: she was not quite asleep, and would fain have opened her eyes, or moved her limbs, to drive, away the vision; but she had not strength enough, for the warmth of the bedclothes enervated her sense’s and this caused her to surrender herself more easily to the embraces she fancied she was receiving. And she would gradually drop into a feverish sleep, preserving her attitude of resistance, even in the midst of her pleasures, and making every effort to free herself from James’s clasp, and tasting, after each of her vain struggles, a faint pleasure in allowing herself to fall overcome on this man’s breast. Since she had ceased to watch by Lucy’s bedside, not a night had passed without this horrid dream. On waking up in the morning, a burning blush would mount to her cheeks, and a painful feeling of disgust would almost choke her as she saw her husband looking at her. She made a solemn vow never to go to sleep again, and to keep her eyes always open, so as never again to commit, by William’s side, this adultery into which her sleep betrayed her.

One night, William heard her moan, and thinking she was unwell, he sat up in bed, and moved away from her a little so as to see her face by the light of the night-lamp. The young couple were alone in the room, for they had had Lucy’s bed carried back to its own place. Madeleine had ceased to moan, and her husband, bending over her, was examining her face with anxious earnestness. In raising himself up he had pulled back the bedclothes and partly uncovered her white shoulders: a quiver was passing over her pearly skin, and her lips were half-open with a tender smile, and yet she was fast asleep. Suddenly she seemed moved with a sort of nervous shock, and she uttered another soft and poignant moan. The blood had rushed to her neck, and she was stifling and murmuring, “James, James,” in a tender voice and with faint sighs.

William, pale and frozen to the soul, had jumped on to the floor. With his naked feet in the thick rug, and his hands leaning on the edge of the bed, he leaned over, watching the agitation of Madeleine, in the shadow of the curtains, as if he had been looking at some monstrous sight which nailed him to the spot with horror. For nearly two minutes he stood aghast, unable to turn away his eyes, and listening, in spite of himself, to the stifled murmur of his young wife. She had thrown back the clothes and was stretching out her arms, with the smile still on her lips and repeating, “James, James,” in an endearing tone that gradually died away.

At last William flew into a passion. He felt, for a moment, as if he must strangle this creature whose mouth was uttering the name of another and whose neck was inflated with pleasure. He placed his hand on one of her bare shoulders and shook her roughly.

“Madeleine, Madeleine!” he growled, “wake up.”

She woke up, with a start, panting for breath, and bathed in perspiration. —

“What? What is there?” she stammered, sitting up in bed and looking round with a wild expression.

Then she saw that she was half-naked, and perceived her husband standing on the rug. The earnest look that he was fixing on her panting breast told her all, and she burst into sobs.

They did not exchange a word. What could they have said? William felt a wild desire to fly into a passion, and to treat his wife as the most infamous of wretches, as a prostitute who was defiling their bed; but he restrained himself, for he felt that he could not accuse her for her dreams. As for Madeleine, she could have beaten herself: she would fain have defended herself for the faults of which her sleep alone was guilty, yet not finding any suitable words, and seeing that nothing, all innocent as she was, could purify her in the eyes of William, she was seized with a veritable madness of despair. The smallest details of her nightmare came back to her mind: she had heard herself calling James in her sleep, and she remembered how she had felt the sighs and quiverings of love. And her husband was there listening and looking on. What shame, what infamy!

William had got into bed again, and was lying at the very edge, avoiding all contact. His hands beneath his head, and his eyes fixed on the ceiling, he seemed buried in an unrelenting reverie. Madeleine was still sitting up and sobbing. She had covered her shoulders, and tied up her red hair, in an instinctive feeling of modesty. Her husband was becoming a stranger to her, and she was ashamed of her disorder and of the quivers that were passing over her bare skin. The silence and stillness of her husband depressed her, and, at last, she grew terrified at seeing him muse like that. She would have preferred a quarrel which would have thrown them, perhaps, weeping and forgiving, into each other’s arms. If they said nothing, if they tacitly accepted the anguish of their situation, all would be over between them for the future. And she shuddered in her night-dress, which she had drawn over her knees: she gave a deep sigh, yet William never seemed to notice that she was suffering by his side.

Just at this moment, the singing of a psalm descended from the storey above. This singing, muffled by the thickness of the ceiling, filled the silent room as if with a dying groan. It was Geneviève who, unable to sleep doubtless, was working out her own salvation and that of her master and mistress. To-night, her voice died away in lamentations that were strangely ominous. Madeleine listened, seized with terror; she could fancy that a funeral procession was passing through the corridors of the house, and that the priests were coming with the singing of psalms to take her and bury her alive. Then she recognised the shrill voice of the old protestant, and she had a still more horrible nightmare. Seeing William still silent, with firmly closed lips and fixed staring eyes, she said to herself that Geneviève’s, chants were going to remind him perhaps of the prayer of exorcism which this woman had taught him. He would lean over her, and make a cabalistic sign on her left breast, another on her right breast, and a third on her navel, repeating three times: “Lubrica, daughter of hell, return to the flames which thou hast left for the damnation of men. May thy skin become black, may thy red hair spread over thy whole body and cover thee with a beast’s fur. Disappear in the name of Him at whose word thou tremblest, disappear in the name of God the Father.” And, who knows? perhaps then she would crumble into dust. In her fright at this gloomy hour of the night, and still shuddering at the thought of her bad dreams, she looked upon the vagaries of the fanatic as realities, and asked herself if a prayer would not be enough indeed to kill her. She was seized with childish terror, and lay down quietly, covering herself with the bed-clothes. Her teeth chattered and she dreaded every instant to feel William’s fingers tracing signs on her skin. If he was lying thus with his lips closed and his eyes open, it was, doubtless, because he was waiting till she was asleep, to assure himself if she were a woman or a demon. This foolish, yet overwhelming fear, kept her awake till morning.

Next night the young couple occupied separate beds, by tacit agreement. From this moment there was divorce between them, for the scene of the previous night had as it were annulled their marriage. Since James’s reappearance, everything had been gradually tending to this separation. They had been infatuated enough to wish to drive away the memory of this man by mutual embraces, and they had only declared themselves vanquished when they had found it impossible to continue the contest any longer, William feeling that he had no courage left to sleep by Madeleine’s side when she was subject to her nightmares, Madeleine unable to devise means to keep herself awake. Their divorce brought them some consolation. The most strange thing was that they still loved each other with deep affection, and their mutual pity was even mingled with a mutual desire. The abyss, which the powers of fate had placed between them, only separated them in the flesh, for they stood on the brinks of the gulf adoring each other from afar. Their fits of anger and disgust were thus full of an affection which was powerless to bridge over the abyss between them. They felt that they were separated for ever; but if they despaired of a reunion and of resuming their tranquil life of love, they still felt a sort of bitter pleasure in living under the same roof, and this pleasure prevented them from seeking a remedy for their sufferings in a violent and immediate termination of them.

They always shrank from deciding what they would do when James came back. They had at first put off till next day the unpleasant task of making up their minds. And every day they deferred till the next the conversation that they wished to have on this subject. The difficulty of coming to a rational decision, and the pain which such a discussion must cause them, frightened them and gave rise to their endless delays. As the weeks passed by they felt themselves more cowardly and more incapable of openness and energy. Towards the end of the first month, the days that they spent were most trying, for they fancied continually that they could hear James ringing at the door. They had not even the courage to confide to each other their fears, or to seek for comfort by talking of what alarmed them both; all they did was to turn pale, and exchange terrified glances at each pull of the bell. At last, in the latter part of February, William received a letter from the doctor, in which their old friend told them first about the death of his poor comrade in the hospital at Toulon: then he wound up jovially by explaining to them how a young lady, whom he had met in this port and afterwards followed to Nice, presented him from returning to Paris, as soon as he would have wished. He would stay in the south a fortnight or perhaps a month longer. William silently handed this letter to Madeleine, watching for the emotion that it would produce on her face. But she sat perfectly unmoved; a slight contraction of the lips only betrayed any feeling. The young couple, free now from immediate danger, told themselves that they had still time before them and again put off the unpleasant task of making up their minds.

Yet their stay at La Noiraude was becoming unbearable, for everything seemed to be dogging their footsteps. One sunny morning as they had gone down to the park, they noticed, peering through the railings that bordered the road to Mantes, the hideous face of Verdigris following them with her vacant eyes. Some accident had doubtless brought this rover to Véteuil. She seemed to recognise Madeleine;
a smile displayed her yellow teeth, and she began to sing the first verse of a song with which the two young women had in the old days made the echoes ring in Verrières wood, as they returned from their pleasure parties, in the chilly dusk.

Her husky voice screeched out:

There was a rich pasha

Whose name was Mustapha,

He bought for his harem

A certain Miss Wharem.

And tra la la, tra la la la.

Tra la la la, la la, la la.

The refrain had a sound of terrible irony in her mouth, and the “tra la la’s” which she repeated with renewed Volubility died away in a hysterical laugh. Madeleine and William hastened towards the house as if haunted by this vile song. But from that day, the young wife could not set foot out of doors without finding Verdigris clinging to some bar of the railings. The poor woman was always prowling about La Noiraude, with brute obstinacy; she had no doubt recognised her old friend, and she came to see her as a matter of course, without thinking of any harm. For hours together, she walked like children do, on the stone coping into which the iron railings were fixed; thus she went on, clinging to the bars, then stopping all of a sudden, and putting her hands on the top to look, with prying eyes and open mouth, into the park. She was often heard on the road, singing, behind some wall, the story of Miss Wharem; she would repeat the verses ten or a dozen times over, with the pertinacity of a disordered brain which delights in saying over and over again the few phrases that it can remember. Every time that Madeleine saw Verdigris from the windows she felt a shudder of repugnance, for it seemed as if her past life were prowling around her. This ragged woman, running behind the railing and sticking her face to the bars, appeared to her like some unclean animal trying to break out of its cage so as to get near her and pollute her with its slaver. For a moment she thought of getting her driven out of the country; but she was afraid of a scandal and preferred to condemn herself to stay in the house and not even go to the windows.