Complete Works of Emile Zola (121 page)

William was five years older than Madeleine. He was tall and thin and of aristocratic bearing. His long face, with its sharp features, would have been ugly, but for the purity of his complexion and the loftiness of his brow. His whole aspect betokened the intelligent and yet enfeebled descendant of a strong race. At times, he would be seized with a sudden nervous shudder and seem as timid as a child. Slightly bent, he spoke with hesitating gestures, scanning Madeleine with his eyes before opening his lips. He was afraid of displeasing her and trembled lest his person, his attitude, or his voice should be disagreeable to her.

Always distrustful of himself, he appeared humble and fawning. Yet, when he thought himself slighted, he would draw himself up in a burst of pride. It was in this pride that his strength lay. He would perhaps have been guilty of acts of cowardice, had there not been in him an innate proudness, a nervous susceptibility which made him resist everything which hurt his finer feelings. He was one of those beings with tender and deep emotions who feel a poignant need of love and tranquillity, who willingly allow themselves to be lulled into an eternal peacefulness; these beings, with the sensitiveness of a woman, easily forget the world for the retreat of their own heart, in the certitude of their own nobleness, the moment the world entangles them in its shame and misery. If William forgot himself in Madeleine’s smiles, if he felt an exquisite delight in surveying her pearly complexion, there would come at times, unconsciously, a curl of disdain on his lips, when his young companion cast on him a cold, almost deriding glance.

The young couple had turned the bend in the road to Champs-Girard, and were now in a lane which extends with hopeless monotony between two grey walls. They hastened on in order to get out of this narrow passage. Then they continued their walk across fields where the footpath was hardly defined. They passed by the foot of the hill where the enormous Robinson chestnut-trees grow, and arrived at Aulnay. This quick walk had heated their blood. The genial warmth of the sun dispelled their restraint, in the free air which blew on their faces from the fresh warm wind. The tacit state of warfare in which they alighted from the train had gradually given place to the familiarity of comrades. They were forgetting their previous stiffness: the country was filling them with such a feeling of comfort, that they no longer thought of eyeing one another or standing on their guard.

At Aulnay they stopped for a moment in the shade of the big trees, under which it is always delightfully cool. They had been warm in the sun; they now felt the delicious coolness of the leaves as they fell on their shoulders.

“Hang it, if I know where we are,’’ exclaimed William after they had recovered their breath.” Do people eat, I wonder, in this country?”

“Yes, no fear,” replied Madeleine gaily, “we shall be at table in half-an-hour. Come this way.’’

She led him quickly towards the lane bordered with palings which leads on to the open country. Here, she withdrew her arm from William’s, and began to run like a young dog filled with a sudden feeling of friskiness. All her girlishness awoke in her, and she again became a little child in the cool shade, in the chilly silence under the trees. Her smiles lit up her whole face and imparted a luminous transparency to her grey eyes: the girlish graces of her cheeks and lips softened the hard lines of her forehead. She would run forward, then come back, shouting joyously, holding her skirts in her hand, filling the lane with the rustling of her dress and leaving behind her a vague perfume of violet. William kept looking at her with supreme delight: he had forgotten the cold, proud woman, he felt happy, he indulged his feelings of tenderness for this big child who would run away from him with a wave of the hand to follow her, and then, suddenly turning round, run up and lean half-wearily, half-caressingly on his shoulder.

In one place, the road has been cut through a sand hill, and the surface of the ground is covered with a fine dust into which the feet sink. Madeleine took a delight in picking the softest places. She would raise little shrill cries as she felt her boots disappearing. She would try to take long strides, and laugh, when held back by the moving sand, at not being able to get on, just as a twelve-year-old girl would have done.

Then the road ascends with sudden turns between wooded knolls. This end of the valley has a lonely and wild aspect which takes one by surprise on emerging from the cool shades of Aulnay: a few rocks peep out of the ground, the grass on the slopes is browned by the sun, and big briars struggle in the ditches. Madeleine took William’s arm in silence: she was tired, and was touched with an indefinable feeling on this stony, deserted road, where there was no house to be seen, and which wound about in a sort of ominous hollow. Still trembling from the effects of her gambols and laughter she put no check on herself. William felt her warm arm press against his own. At this moment, he knew that this woman was his, that there was in her, beneath the implacable energy of her mind, a feeble heart which stood in need of caresses. When she raised her eyes towards him, she looked at him with tender humility, and with tearful smiles. She was becoming docile and coquettish; she appeared to be seeking for the young man’s love like a poor shy woman. Fatigue, the deliciousness of the shade, the awakening of the youthful feeling, the wild place she was passing through, all imparted to her being an emotion of love — one of those languors of the senses which make the proudest woman fall into the arms of a man.

William and Madeleine were slowly ascending. At times the young woman’s foot slipped, on a stone and she checked herself by clinging to her companion’s arm. This clinging was a caress; neither of them attempted to disguise it. They had ceased to talk, they were satisfied with exchanging smiles. This language was sufficient to give expression to the only feeling which was filling their hearts. Madeleine’s face was charming under the sunshade; it had a tender paleness with shadows of silvery grey; round the mouth played rosy gleams, and at’ the corner of the lips, on William’s side, there was a little network of bluish veins of such delicacy, that he felt one of those wild longings to imprint a kiss on this very spot. He was shy, and hesitated till they were at the top of the steep. Here, as they came suddenly on the plain extended before them, it seemed to the young couple that they were no longer concealed. Although the country was deserted, they were afraid of this broad expanse. They separated, uncomfortable, embarrassed again.

The road follows the edge of the high ground. To the left are strawberry-patches, and immense open fields of com planted with a few scattered trees and losing themselves at the horizon. In the distance the Verrières wood traces a black line, which seems to border the sky with a mourning band.

To the right are slopes, displaying to view several miles of country; first come dark and brown tracts of land, and enormous masses of foliage; then the tints and lines become more indistinct, the landscape is lost to view in a bluish atmosphere, terminated by low hills whose pale violet hue mingles with the soft yellow of the sky.

It is an immensity, a veritable sea of hills and valleys, relieved here and there by the white reflection of a house and the sombre ray of a cluster of poplars.

Madeleine stopped, serious and thoughtful, before this immensity. Warm gusts of air were blowing, a storm was slowly rising from the bottom of the valley. The sun had just disappeared behind a thick mass of vapour, and heavy clouds of coppery grey were gathering from every point of the horizon. She had again assumed her stem, taciturn expression: she seemed to have forgotten her companion, and was looking at the country with curious attention, as though it was an old acquaintance. Then she fixed her eyes on the dark clouds and seemed to indulge in painful recollections.

William, who stood a few paces off, watched her uneasily. He felt that a gulf was increasing every moment between them. What could she be thinking of like that? he could not bear the idea of not being all-in-all to this woman. He kept saying to himself, with secret terror, that she had lived twenty years without him. These twenty years seemed to him a terrible blank.

Certainly, she knew the country, perhaps she had been here before with a lover. William was dying with the wish to question her, but he did not dare to do so openly he dreaded getting an answer which might blight his love. He could not, however, resist saying hesitatingly:

“You used to come here sometimes then, Madeleine?”

“Yes,” she replied shortly, “often — Let us hurry on, it might rain.”

They started again, at a short distance from one another, both absorbed in their own thoughts. In this way they came to the open road. Here, on the edge of the wood, is the inn to which Madeleine led her companion. It is an ugly square building, all cracked and blackened by the rain; at the back, on the side of the wood, a kind of yard planted with stunted trees is enclosed hay a quick-set hedge. Against this hedge lean five or six arbours covered with hop-plants. They are the private rooms belonging to the inn: tables and benches of rough wood are placed along them fixed in the ground: the bottoms of the glasses have left red rings on the table tops.

The landlady, a big, coarse woman, uttered a cry of surprise as she saw Madeleine.

“Well! really!” she exclaimed, “I thought you were dead: I’ve not seen you for more than three months — And how are you — “

Just then she perceived William and refrained from putting another question which she had on her lips. She even seemed taken aback by the presence of this young man whom she did not know. The latter saw her astonishment and said to himself that she was doubtless expecting to see another face.

“Well, well,” she went on, adopting a less familiar tone, “you want some dinner, don’t you? You shall have a table laid in one of the arbours.”

Madeleine bad received the landlady’s marks of friendship very calmly. She took off her shawl and bonnet and went to put them in a room on the ground floor, which was let at night to belated Parisians. She seemed quite at home.

William had gone into the yard. He walked up and down, not knowing quite what to do with himself. Nobody paid any attention to him, while the scullery-maid and the dog even were giving a warm welcome to Madeleine.

When she came back, she was smiling again. She stopped for a second on the threshold; her hair, free and uncovered, shone in the last rays of sunlight, giving a marble whiteness to her skin: her chest and shoulders, no longer covered with her shawl, had a powerful breadth and exquisite suppleness. The young man cast a look, full of uneasy admiration, on this lovely creature vibrating with life. Another had doubtless seen her thus, smiling on the threshold of this door. In the distress which this thought caused him, he felt a violent wish to take Madeleine in his arms, to press her to his bosom that she might forget this house, this yard, and these arbours, and think only of him.

“Let us have dinner, quick!” she exclaimed joyously. Now then, Marie, gather a big dish of strawberries — I’m hungry.”

She was forgetting William. She looked into every arbour, trying to find the one where the cloth was laid. At last she found it.

“I declare, I won’t sit on that seat,” she said, “I remember it is full of big nails which tore my dress. Set the table here, Marie.”

She placed herself in front of the white cloth, on which the servant had not yet had time to put the plates. Then she bethought herself of William, and saw him standing a few paces off.

“Well,” said she to him, “are you not coming to sit down? You stand there like a taper.”

Then she burst out laughing. The storm which was coming on made her feel nervously gay. Her gestures were without animation, her words short. The gloomy weather, on the contrary, filled William with dejection; he dropped on to his chair with listless limbs and answered only in monosyllables. The dinner lasted for more than an hour. The young couple were alone in the yard: for, during the week, the country inns are generally empty. Madeleine talked the whole time: she talked about her younger days, about her stay in a Ternes boarding-school, relating with A thousand details the silly tricks of the governesses and the pranks of the scholars: on this subject she was inexhaustible, continually finding among her recollections some good story which made her laugh before she began. She told all this with childish smiles, and in a young girl’s tone of voice. Several times, William tried to bring her to a less remote subject; like those wretches who are suffering and who are always itching to put their hands to their wound, he would have liked to hear her speak of her immediate past, of her grown-up life: he skilfully changed the conversation so as to get her to tell how she had come to tear her dress in one of these arbours. But Madeleine eluded his questions, and rushed off, with a sort of infatuation, into the naive stories of her early days. This seemed to soothe her, to relieve her high-strung feelings, and to make her accept more naturally her tête-à-tête with a young fellow whom she had scarcely known a week. When William looked at her with a gaze full of longing desire, when he put out his hand to stroke hers, she would take a strange pleasure in keeping her eyes raised and beginning a tale with: “I was five years old then — “

Towards the end of dinner, as they were at dessert, big drops of rain wet the cloth. The day had suddenly come to a close. The thunder was rumbling in the distance and coming near with the dull sustained roar of an army on the march. A bright flash of lightning ran across the white table-cloth.

“Here comes the storm,” said Madeleine. “Oh! I love the lightning.”

She got up and went into the middle of the yard to get a better view. William remained seated in the arbour. He was in pain. A storm gave him a strange feeling of dread. His mind remained firm, and he had no fear of being struck by lightning, but his whole body revolted at the noise of thunder, especially at the blinding flashes of the electric fluid. When a flash dazzled his eyes he seemed to receive a violent blow in the chest, and felt a pang of pain in his breast which left him trembling and aghast.