Thérèse Raquin (14 page)

Laurent slowly dressed himself, with a feeling of sullen irritation,
exasperated at having been unable to sleep, exasperated at allowing
himself to be caught by a fright which he now regarded as childish. As
he drew on this trousers he stretched himself, he rubbed his limbs,
he passed his hands over his face, harassed and clouded by a feverish
night. And he repeated:

"I ought not to have thought of all that, I should have gone to sleep.
Had I done so, I should be fresh and well-disposed now."

Then it occurred to him that if he had been with Therese, she would have
prevented him being afraid, and this idea brought him a little calm. At
the bottom of his heart he dreaded passing other nights similar to the
one he had just gone through.

After splashing some water in his face, he ran the comb through his
hair, and this bit of toilet while refreshing his head, drove away the
final vestiges of terror. He now reasoned freely, and experienced no
other inconvenience from his restless night, than great fatigue in all
his limbs.

"I am not a poltroon though," he said to himself as he finished
dressing. "I don't care a fig about Camille. It's absurd to think that
this poor devil is under my bed. I shall, perhaps, have the same idea,
now, every night. I must certainly marry as soon as possible. When
Therese has me in her arms, I shall not think much about Camille. She
will kiss me on the neck, and I shall cease to feel the atrocious burn
that troubles me at present. Let me examine this bite."

He approached his glass, extended his neck and looked. The scar
presented a rosy appearance. Then, Laurent, perceiving the marks of the
teeth of his victim, experienced a certain emotion. The blood flew
to his head, and he now observed a strange phenomenon. The ruby flood
rushing to the scar had turned it purple, it became raw and sanguineous,
standing out quite red against the fat, white neck. Laurent at the same
time felt a sharp pricking sensation, as if needles were being thrust
into the wound, and he hurriedly raised the collar of his shirt again.

"Bah!" he exclaimed, "Therese will cure that. A few kisses will suffice.
What a fool I am to think of these matters!"

He put on his hat, and went downstairs. He wanted to be in the open
air and walk. Passing before the door of the cellar, he smiled.
Nevertheless, he made sure of the strength of the hook fastening the
door. Outside, on the deserted pavement, he moved along with short steps
in the fresh matutinal air. It was then about five o'clock.

Laurent passed an atrocious day. He had to struggle against the
overpowering drowsiness that settled on him in the afternoon at his
office. His heavy, aching head nodded in spite of himself, but he
abruptly brought it up, as soon as he heard the step of one of his
chiefs. This struggle, these shocks completed wearing out his limbs,
while causing him intolerable anxiety.

In the evening, notwithstanding his lassitude, he went to see Therese,
only to find her feverish, extremely low-spirited, and as weary as
himself.

"Our poor Therese has had a bad night," Madame Raquin said to him,
as soon as he had seated himself. "It seems she was suffering from
nightmare, and terrible insomnia. I heard her crying out on several
occasions. This morning she was quite ill."

Therese, while her aunt was speaking, looked fixedly at Laurent. No
doubt, they guessed their common terror, for a nervous shudder ran over
their countenances. Until ten o'clock they remained face to face with
one another, talking of commonplace matters, but still understanding
each other, and mutually imploring themselves with their eyes, to hasten
the moment when they could unite against the drowned man.

Therese also had been visited by the spectre of Camille, during this
feverish night.

After over a year of indifference, Laurent's sudden attentions had
aroused her senses. As she tossed herself about in insomnia, she had
seen the drowned man rise up before her; like Laurent she had writhed
in terror, and she had said as he had done, that she would no longer be
afraid, that she would no more experience such sufferings, when she had
her sweetheart in her arms.

This man and woman had experienced at the same hour, a sort of nervous
disorder which set them panting with terror. A consanguinity had become
established between them. They shuddered with the same shudder; their
hearts in a kind of poignant friendship, were wrung with the same
anguish. From that moment they had one body and one soul for enjoyment
and suffering.

This communion, this mutual penetration is a psychological and
physiological phenomenon which is often found to exist in beings who
have been brought into violent contact by great nervous shocks.

For over a year, Therese and Laurent lightly bore the chain riveted to
their limbs that united them. In the depression succeeding the acute
crisis of the murder, amidst the feelings of disgust, and the need for
calm and oblivion that had followed, these two convicts might fancy they
were free, that they were no longer shackled together by iron fetters.
The slackened chain dragged on the ground. They reposed, they found
themselves struck with a sort of delightful insensibility, they sought
to love elsewhere, to live in a state of wise equilibrium. But from
the day when urged forward by events, they came to the point of again
exchanging burning sentences, the chain became violently strained, and
they received such a shock, that they felt themselves for ever linked to
one another.

The day following this first attack of nightmare, Therese secretly set
to work to bring about her marriage with Laurent. It was a difficult
task, full of peril. The sweethearts trembled lest they should commit an
imprudence, arouse suspicions, and too abruptly reveal the interest they
had in the death of Camille.

Convinced that they could not mention marriage themselves, they arranged
a very clever plan which consisted in getting Madame Raquin herself, and
the Thursday evening guests, to offer them what they dared not ask for.
It then only became necessary to convey to these worthy people the idea
of remarrying Therese, and particularly to make them believe that this
idea originated with themselves, and was their own.

The comedy was long and delicate to perform. Therese and Laurent
took the parts adapted to them, and proceeded with extreme prudence,
calculating the slightest gesture, and the least word. At the bottom
of their hearts, they were devoured by a feeling of impatience that
stiffened and strained their nerves. They lived in a state of constant
irritation, and it required all their natural cowardice to compel them
to show a smiling and peaceful exterior.

If they yearned to bring the business to an end, it was because they
could no longer remain separate and solitary. Each night, the drowned
man visited them, insomnia stretched them on beds of live coal and
turned them over with fiery tongs. The state of enervation in which they
lived, nightly increased the fever of their blood, which resulted in
atrocious hallucinations rising up before them.

Therese no longer dared enter her room after dusk. She experienced the
keenest anguish, when she had to shut herself until morning in this
large apartment, which became lit-up with strange glimmers, and peopled
with phantoms as soon as the light was out. She ended by leaving her
candle burning, and by preventing herself falling asleep, so as to
always have her eyes wide open. But when fatigue lowered her lids, she
saw Camille in the dark, and reopened her eyes with a start. In the
morning she dragged herself about, broken down, having only slumbered
for a few hours at dawn.

As to Laurent, he had decidedly become a poltroon since the night he
had taken fright when passing before the cellar door. Previous to that
incident he had lived with the confidence of a brute; now, at the least
sound, he trembled and turned pale like a little boy. A shudder of
terror had suddenly shaken his limbs, and had clung to him. At night,
he suffered even more than Therese; and fright, in this great, soft,
cowardly frame, produced profound laceration to the feelings. He watched
the fall of day with cruel apprehension. On several occasions, he failed
to return home, and passed whole nights walking in the middle of the
deserted streets.

Once he remained beneath a bridge, until morning, while the rain poured
down in torrents; and there, huddled up, half frozen, not daring to rise
and ascend to the quay, he for nearly six hours watched the dirty water
running in the whitish shadow. At times a fit of terror brought him flat
down on the damp ground: under one of the arches of the bridge he seemed
to see long lines of drowned bodies drifting along in the current. When
weariness drove him home, he shut himself in, and double-locked the
door. There he struggled until daybreak amidst frightful attacks of
fever.

The same nightmare returned persistently: he fancied he fell from
the ardent clasp of Therese into the cold, sticky arms of Camille. He
dreamt, first of all, that his sweetheart was stifling him in a warm
embrace, and then that the corpse of the drowned man pressed him to his
chest in an ice-like strain. These abrupt and alternate sensations of
voluptuousness and disgust, these successive contacts of burning love
and frigid death, set him panting for breath, and caused him to shudder
and gasp in anguish.

Each day, the terror of the lovers increased, each day their attacks of
nightmare crushed and maddened them the more. They no longer relied on
their kisses to drive away insomnia. By prudence, they did not dare
make appointments, but looked forward to their wedding-day as a day of
salvation, to be followed by an untroubled night.

It was their desire for calm slumber that made them wish for their
union. They had hesitated during the hours of indifference, both being
oblivious of the egotistic and impassioned reasons that had urged them
to the crime, and which were now dispelled. It was in vague despair that
they took the supreme resolution to unite openly. At the bottom of their
hearts they were afraid. They had leant, so to say, one on the other
above an unfathomable depth, attracted to it by its horror. They
bent over the abyss together, clinging silently to one another, while
feelings of intense giddiness enfeebled their limbs and gave them
falling madness.

But at the present moment, face to face with their anxious expectation
and timorous desires, they felt the imperative necessity of closing
their eyes, and of dreaming of a future full of amorous felicity and
peaceful enjoyment. The more they trembled one before the other, the
better they foresaw the horror of the abyss to the bottom of which
they were about to plunge, and the more they sought to make promises
of happiness to themselves, and to spread out before their eyes the
invincible facts that fatally led them to marriage.

Therese desired her union with Laurent solely because she was afraid
and wanted a companion. She was a prey to nervous attacks that drove her
half crazy. In reality she reasoned but little, she flung herself into
love with a mind upset by the novels she had recently been reading,
and a frame irritated by the cruel insomnia that had kept her awake for
several weeks.

Laurent, who was of a stouter constitution, while giving way to his
terror and his desire, had made up his mind to reason out his decision.
To thoroughly prove to himself that his marriage was necessary, that
he was at last going to be perfectly happy, and to drive away the vague
fears that beset him, he resumed all his former calculations.

His father, the peasant of Jeufosse, seemed determined not to die, and
Laurent said to himself that he might have to wait a long time for the
inheritance. He even feared that this inheritance might escape him, and
go into the pockets of one of his cousins, a great big fellow who turned
the soil over to the keen satisfaction of the old boy. And he would
remain poor; he would live the life of a bachelor in a garret, with a
bad bed and a worse table. Besides, he did not contemplate working all
his life; already he began to find his office singularly tedious. The
light labour entrusted to him became irksome owing to his laziness.

The invariable result of these reflections was that supreme happiness
consisted in doing nothing. Then he remembered that if he had drowned
Camille, it was to marry Therese, and work no more. Certainly, the
thought of having his sweetheart all to himself had greatly influenced
him in committing the crime, but he had perhaps been led to it still
more, by the hope of taking the place of Camille, of being looked after
in the same way, and of enjoying constant beatitude. Had passion alone
urged him to the deed, he would not have shown such cowardice and
prudence. The truth was that he had sought by murder to assure himself a
calm, indolent life, and the satisfaction of his cravings.

All these thoughts, avowedly or unconsciously, returned to him. To find
encouragement, he repeated that it was time to gather in the harvest
anticipated by the death of Camille, and he spread out before him, the
advantages and blessings of his future existence: he would leave his
office, and live in delicious idleness; he would eat, drink and sleep to
his heart's content; he would have an affectionate wife beside him; and,
he would shortly inherit the 40,000 francs and more of Madame Raquin,
for the poor old woman was dying, little by little, every day; in a
word, he would carve out for himself the existence of a happy brute, and
would forget everything.

Laurent mentally repeated these ideas at every moment, since his
marriage with Therese had been decided on. He also sought other
advantages that would result therefrom, and felt delighted when he found
a new argument, drawn from his egotism, in favour of his union with the
widow of the drowned man. But however much he forced himself to hope,
however much he dreamed of a future full of idleness and pleasure, he
never ceased to feel abrupt shudders that gave his skin an icy chill,
while at moments he continued to experience an anxiety that stifled his
joy in his throat.