Complete Works of Emile Zola (139 page)

This idea of marriage and seclusion in a monastery of love, according to William’s description, seemed singularly comic to the doctor.

“Ah! what a curious creature a man in love is,” he exclaimed. “He will not believe that he is the only person on earth with ideas like himself — But, my good friend, husbands like you are not made now-a-days. If I were to get married, I should perhaps heat my wife at the end of a week, although I am not a bad fellow. You must understand that we are quite different men. You have a ridiculous respect for woman, while I look upon her as a dainty feast where one must not get indigestion. If I were to get married and live retired here, I should sincerely pity the sad creature whom I was shutting up in my company.” William shrugged his shoulders.

“You make yourself blacker than you are,” he said. “You would adore your wife, and look on her as an idol the day she presented you with a child. Don’t make sport of my ridiculous respect; it will be so much the worse for you if you never have any. A man ought to love one woman only in his life, the woman that loves him, and they ought both to live in this mutual affection.

“That is a remark I recognise again,” replied James, in a somewhat ironical tone, “you have made it to me before under the willows by the brook. Why, you are just the same, and I find in you the enthusiast of former days — But then, I have not changed either, only I look at love in another light. A life-long connexion would make me afraid, and I have always avoided being bewitched by a petticoat, and my mind is so constituted that I desire every woman without loving one — Pleasure has its bright side, my dear hermit.”

He stopped a moment, then he suddenly asked in his blunt, cheery voice:

“Are you happy, yourself, with your wife?”

William, who was just on the point of pleading in behalf of his sentiments of life-long affection, was calmed by this personal question, which awoke in him the delicious remembrance of his last four years of happiness.

“Oh, yes, I am happy, perfectly happy,” he replied in a softer tone. “You, who refuse to taste it, cannot picture such bliss. It is an endless sensation of being lulled to rest; I can fancy I have become a child again and that I have found a mother. For four years we have been living in this unalloyed happiness, and I only wish you had been there to learn how to love. This silence and this shade which frighten you have made our life a heavenly dream, from which we shall never awake, my friend; I feel the certainty and foretaste of an eternity of peace.”

As he spoke, James was watching him curiously. He had a great wish to question him about his wife, about the kind soul who had consented to drown herself in such a river of milk.

“Is your wife pretty?” he blurted out.

“I don’t know,” replied William. “I am very fond of her. You shall see her to-morrow.”

“Did you get to know her in Véteuil?”

“No, I met her in Paris. We fell in love with one another, and I married her.”

It seemed to James that a slight blush had mounted to his friend’s cheeks, and he had a vague inkling of the truth. He was not a man to refrain from putting any more questions.

“Was she your mistress before she became your wife?” he asked.

“Yes, for a year,” William simply replied.

James got up and took a few steps in silence. Then he came and planted himself in front of his friend and said in a serious tone:

“In the old days, you used to listen to me when I scolded you. Allow me for a moment to assume my old character of protector — You have been very foolish, my good fellow; no one thinks of marrying his mistress. You don’t know anything about life; some day you will see your mistake and you will remember my words. Marriages of this kind are delightful, but they always turn out badly; the husband and wife worship one another for a few years, and then detest each other for the rest of their days.” William had now jumped up.

“Hold your tongue,” he exclaimed with sudden firmness, “I love you very well as you are, but I don’t want you to judge of us from other married people. When you have seen my wife, you will repent of your words.”

“I repent already if you wish it,” said the doctor in his still grave tone. “Let us say that experience has made me sceptical and that I am unable to understand the refinements of your affection. I have simply spoken my mind. It is somewhat late to give you advice; but, if the time should come, you will be able to derive some advantage from my warning.”

Then there was a painful silence. At this moment a servant came to announce that the blue room was ready. William’s face recovered its genial smile, and he held out his hand to his friend with a cordial and endearing movement.

“You shall go to bed,” he said. “To-morrow it will be light and you shall see my wife and my little Lucy — Come now, I will convert you! I will make you marry some good girl, and you will end by coming and burying yourself in this old house. Happiness is patient, and it will wait for you here.”

The two young fellows chatted as they walked. When they were in the hall, at the foot of the staircase, James took his old comrade by the hand.

“Don’t be offended at me for my remarks,” he said with great effusion: “I desire nothing but your welfare — You are happy, are you not?”

He was already going up the steps to the first floor.

“Oh, yes!” replied William with a last smile, “everybody is happy here — Good night,”

As he was going back into the dining-room, he saw Madeleine standing in the middle of the room. The young wife had heard the whole of the conversation between the two friends. She had remained behind the drawing-room door, rooted to the spot by James’s voice. This voice, whose smallest inflexions she knew again, produced a strange effect on her. She followed the sentences, calling to mind the gestures and movements of the head with which the speaker must be accompanying them. The door which separated her from her former lover did not exist for her; she fancied that he was before her eyes, living, moving, as in the days when he would take her to his breast in the Rue Soufflot. The presence, the vicinity of this man caused her a bitter pleasure; her throat choked with anguish at his hearty laughs, while her body burned with the feverish excitement which he had been the first to cause her to know. She felt, though with secret horror, attracted towards him: she would fain have fled, but she could not, and she enjoyed an involuntary pleasure in seeing him brought to life again. Several times she stooped down with an instinctive movement, trying to peep through the keyhole, so as to get a better view of him. The few moments that she stood like this, fainting, and leaning her bands against the door, seemed to her an eternity of torments. “If I fall,” she would think, “they will come, and I shall die of shame.” Some of James’s remarks went to her heart; when he declared that a man never ought to marry his mistress, she began to sob, stifling her tears, afraid of being heard. This conversation, these projects of happiness which she was going to dash to the ground, and these confidences which wounded the very depths of her being, were for her an unspeakable torture. She could hardly catch William’s gentle voice; her ears were filled with James’s scolding accents which burst with terrible fury in the midst of her calm sky. She felt thunderstruck.

When the two friends went to the foot of the staircase, she made a supreme effort, telling herself that all this must end. After what she had just heard it was impossible for her to accept such a situation till to-morrow. Her straightforward nature revolted at the idea of it. She came back into the dining-room. Her red hair had fallen down; her face, horribly pale, was covered with sudden twitches, and her dilated eyes seemed the sullen vacant eyes of a mad-woman. William, surprised to find her there, was terrified at seeing her disorder. He hurried up to her, asking:

“What is the matter with you, Madeleine? have you not been to bed?”

She replied in a hollow voice, pointing to the door of the drawing-room.

“No, I was there.’’

She took a step towards her husband, put her hands on his shoulders, and looking at him with her cold eyes asked in a brief tone:

“Is James your friend?”

“Yes,” replied William with astonishment, “you know very well he is, I have told you what a strong bond unites us — James is my brother, and I want you to love him as a sister.”

At this word sister a strange smile came over her face. She shut her eyes for a moment: then opening them again, she replied, paler and more resolute:

“You are dreaming of getting him to share our life; you want him to come and live with us, so as to have him always by your side?”

“Certainly,” said the young man, “that is my dearest wish — I should be so happy with him and you, as I should live between the only two beings in the world who love me — In our young days, James and I swore to have everything in common.”

“Ah! you took that oath,” murmured Madeleine, struck to the heart by her husband’s innocent remark.

Never had the thought of being shared by James and William caused her so much distress. She had to keep silent: her throat was dry, and she could only have uttered cries to confess the truth. At this moment Geneviève entered the room without attracting the notice of the young couple: she saw their trouble and stood erect in the shade; her eager eyes shone bright, and her lips were moving silently, as if she was pronouncing words of exorcism in an undertone.

During the whole of Madeleine’s confession, she stood there, motionless and implacable, like the rigid and mute figure of Fate.

“Why do you ask me these questions?” said William at last, with a vague feeling of terror at his wife’s attitude.

Madeleine did not reply at once. She continued to lean with her hands on her husband’s shoulders, looking at him closely in his eyes with ruthless fixedness. She hoped that he would read the truth in her face, and that she would thus be spared the pain of having to confess her shame aloud. The thought of immediate avowal was horribly distressing to her. She did not know how to begin, and yet she must do it.

“I knew James in Paris,” she said, slowly.

“Is that all?” exclaimed William, failing to understand. “You frightened me — Ah well! if you knew him in Paris, he will be an old acquaintance for both of us, that’s all — Do you suppose that I dream of blushing on your account? I have already told our history to our friend, I am proud of our intimacy.”

“I knew James,” repeated the young wife, in a hoarser tone.

“Well?

The blindness, the absolute confidence of her husband distressed Madeleine. He would not understand, he was compelling her to blurt out the truth. She felt an outburst of fury, and exclaimed, violently:

“Listen, you have implored me never to speak to you of my past. I have obeyed you and almost forgotten it. But now the past is coming to life again, and crushing me, wretched me, who was living so peacefully here. I cannot, however, keep silent. I must tell you about it, so that you may prevent James from seeing me — I knew him, do you understand?”

William sank down on a chair in the chimney corner. He thought he had received a blow on the skull, and stretched out his hands as if to cling to something in his fall. His whole body turned cold. The nervous trembling which had made his legs give way shook him from head to foot, and set his teeth a-chattering.

“Him! — Oh! wretched woman! wretched woman!” he repeated in a broken voice.

He clasped his hands in an attitude of prayer. His hair slightly erect on his temples, his eye-balls dilated, his lips white and quivering, his whole face agitated by poignant anguish, seemed to be praying to heaven not to smite him with so much cruelty. There was more fear than anger in his mind. This was the attitude he used to have at school when his comrades were coming to beat him, and he would shrink despairingly into a corner, asking himself what wrong be could have done. He could find in his bleeding heart, not one reproach, not one insulting word to cast at Madeleine to ease his grief: he could do nothing but gaze at her in silence, with a beseeching terrified look in his big child’s eyes.

Madeleine hoped he would strike her. Her temper would have risen under his blows, and all her energy would have come back. But his looks of despair, and his imploring attitude made her cast herself panting at his feet.

“Forgive me,” she stammered, throwing herself prostrate on the ground, weeping, her hair all down, and shaken with paroxysms of sobs. “Forgive me, William. You are in pain, my poor fellow. Oh! God has no pity. He punishes His poor creatures like a jealous and implacable master. Geneviève had good cause to tremble before Him, and to be afraid of His anger. I would not believe the woman, and I hoped that heaven did pardon sometimes. But He never pardons. I used to say: The past is dead, I can live in peace. The past was the man who had been swallowed up by the sea. He was buried with my shame deep beneath the waves, rolled in the depths of the ocean, beaten against the rocks and lost to sight for ever. But, oh no! he comes to life again: he returns from the gulf with his hearty laughter: fate casts him ashore, and sends him to rob us of our happiness — Can you understand it, William? He was dead, and yet he is not dead — It is horrid and cruel enough to kill one — It is only miracles like this that Providence performs. He would not kill James all at once, for He wanted this ghost to punish me with — But what have we done wrong? we have loved one another, and we have been happy. It is for our felicity that we are being punished. God wills not that His creatures should live peacefully. It would do me good to blaspheme — Geneviève is right — The past, the wrong never dies.”

“Wretched woman! wretched woman,” repeated William.

“Remember, I did not want to accept the marriage you offered me. When you besought me to unite my life to yours, you remember, that gloomy evening in autumn, by the side of the spring then muddy with the rains, a voice cried to me not to reckon on the clemency of Heaven. I said to you: ‘Let us stay as we are; we love one another, and that is enough: perhaps we should love each other less if we were married.’ And then you insisted, saying that you wanted to have me all to yourself, and to live openly with me: you spoke to me of a life of peace, in words that told of esteem, of life-long affection, and a home in common. Oh! how unmerciful I was to disregard the secret warning of terror! You would have accused me then of not loving you; but to-day I should be escaping from James’s presence, and disappearing from your existence, without sullying your trustful affection, without dragging you with me into the dirt. I thought that if I remained your mistress, I should never become infamous in your eyes, and if we ever were brought face to face with my shame you could drive me away as a worthless creature, and train your disgust to forget me. I should still be an abandoned wretch passing from one man’s bed to another’s, and put to the door by my lovers, at the first blush my ignominy brought to their brow. And now we have a little daughter. Oh, forgive me, my good fellow. I was a base woman to give way to you.”