THERESE RAQUIN
CHAPTER XVI
A fortnight passed. The bitterness of the first hours was softening; each day
brought additional tranquillity and calm; life resumed its course with weary
languidness, and with the monotonous intellectual insensibility which follows
great shocks. At the commencement, Laurent and Therese allowed themselves to
drift into this new existence which was transforming them; within their beings
was proceeding a silent labour which would require analysing with extreme
delicacy if one desired to mark all its phases.
It was not long before Laurent came every night to the shop as formerly. But
he no longer dined there, he no longer made the place a lounge during the entire
evening. He arrived at half-past nine, and remained until he had put up the
shutters. It seemed as if he was accomplishing a duty in placing himself at the
service of the two women. If he happened occasionally to neglect the tiresome
job, he apologised with the humility of a valet the following day. On Thursdays
he assisted Madame Raquin to light the fire, to do the honours of the house, and
displayed all kinds of gentle attentions that charmed the old mercer.
Therese peacefully watched the activity of his movements round about her. The
pallidness of her face had departed. She appeared in better health, more smiling
and gentle. It was only rarely that her lips, becoming pinched in a nervous
contraction, produced two deep pleats which conveyed to her countenance a
strange expression of grief and fright.
The two sweethearts no longer sought to see one another in private. Not once
did they suggest a meeting, nor did they ever furtively exchange a kiss. The
murder seemed to have momentarily appeased their warmth. In killing Camille,
they had succeeded in satisfying their passion. Their crime appeared to have
given them a keen pleasure that sickened and disgusted them of their embraces.
They had a thousand facilities for enjoying the freedom that had been their
dream, and the attainment of which had urged them on to murder. Madame Raquin,
impotent and childish, ceased to be an obstacle. The house belonged to them.
They could go abroad where they pleased. But love did not trouble them, its fire
had died out. They remained there, calmly talking, looking at one another
without reddening and without a thrill. They even avoided being alone. In their
intimacy, they found nothing to say, and both were afraid that they appeared too
cold. When they exchanged a pressure of the hand, they experienced a sort of
discomfort at the touch of their skins.
Both imagined they could explain what made them so indifferent and alarmed
when face to face with one another. They put the coldness of their attitude down
to prudence. Their calm, according to them, was the result of great caution on
their part. They pretended they desired this tranquillity, and somnolence of
their hearts. On the other hand, they regarded the repugnance, the uncomfortable
feeling experienced as a remains of terror, as the secret dread of punishment.
Sometimes, forcing themselves to hope, they sought to resume the burning dreams
of other days, and were quite astonished to find they had no imagination.
Then, they clung to the idea of their forthcoming marriage. They fancied that
having attained their end, without a single fear to trouble them, delivered over
to one another, their passion would burn again, and they would taste the
delights that had been their dream. This prospect brought them calm, and
prevented them descending to the void hollowed out beneath them. They persuaded
themselves they loved one another as in the past, and they awaited the moment
when they were to be perfectly happy bound together for ever.
Never had Therese possessed so placid a mind. She was certainly becoming
better. All her implacable, natural will was giving way. She felt happy at
night, alone in her bed; no longer did she find the thin face, and piteous form
of Camille at her side to exasperate her. She imagined herself a little girl, a
maid beneath the white curtains, lying peacefully amidst the silence and
darkness. Her spacious, and slightly cold room rather pleased her, with its
lofty ceiling, its obscure corners, and its smack of the cloister.
She even ended by liking the great black wall which rose up before her
window. Every night during one entire summer, she remained for hours gazing at
the grey stones in this wall, and at the narrow strips of starry sky cut out by
the chimneys and roofs. She only thought of Laurent when awakened with a start
by nightmare. Then, sitting up, trembling, with dilated eyes, and pressing her
nightdress to her, she said to herself that she would not experience these
sudden fears, if she had a man lying beside her. She thought of her sweetheart
as of a dog who would have guarded and protected her.
Of a daytime, in the shop, she took an interest in what was going on outside;
she went out at her own instigation, and no longer lived in sullen revolt,
occupied with thoughts of hatred and vengeance. It worried her to sit musing.
She felt the necessity of acting and seeing. From morning to night, she watched
the people passing through the arcade. The noise, and going and coming diverted
her. She became inquisitive and talkative, in a word a woman, for hitherto she
had only displayed the actions and ideas of a man.
From her point of observation, she remarked a young man, a student, who lived
at an hotel in the neighbourhood, and who passed several times daily before the
shop. This youth had a handsome, pale face, with the long hair of a poet, and
the moustache of an officer. Therese thought him superior looking. She was in
love with him for a week, in love like a schoolgirl. She read novels, she
compared the young man to Laurent, and found the latter very coarse and heavy.
Her reading revealed to her romantic scenes that, hitherto, she had ignored. She
had only loved with blood and nerves, as yet, and she now began to love with her
head. Then, one day, the student disappeared. No doubt he had moved. In a few
hours Therese had forgotten him.
She now subscribed to a circulating library, and conceived a passion for the
heroes of all the stories that passed under her eyes. This sudden love for
reading had great influence on her temperament. She acquired nervous sensibility
which caused her to laugh and cry without any motive. The equilibrium which had
shown a tendency to be established in her, was upset. She fell into a sort of
vague meditation. At moments, she became disturbed by thoughts of Camille, and
she dreamt of Laurent and fresh love, full of terror and distrust. She again
became a prey to anguish. At one moment she sought for the means of marrying her
sweetheart at that very instant, at another she had an idea of running away
never to see him again.
The novels, which spoke to her of chastity and honour, placed a sort of
obstacle between her instincts and her will. She remained the ungovernable
creature who had wanted to struggle with the Seine and who had thrown herself
violently into illicit love; but she was conscious of goodness and gentleness,
she understood the putty face and lifeless attitude of the wife of Olivier, and
she knew it was possible to be happy without killing one's husband. Then, she
did not see herself in a very good light, and lived in cruel indecision.
Laurent, on his side, passed through several different phases of love and
fever. First of all he enjoyed profound tranquility; he seemed as if relieved of
an enormous weight. At times he questioned himself with astonishment, fancying
he had had a bad dream. He asked himself whether it was really true that he had
flung Camille into the water, and had seen his corpse on the slab at the Morgue.
The recollection of his crime caused him strange surprise; never could he
have imagined himself capable of murder. He so prudent, so cowardly, shuddered
at the mere thought, ice-like beads of perspiration stood out on his forehead
when he reflected that the authorities might have discovered his crime and
guillotined him. Then he felt the cold knife on his neck. So long as he had
acted, he had gone straight before him, with the obstinacy and blindness of a
brute. Now, he turned round, and at the sight of the gulf he had just cleared,
grew faint with terror.
"Assuredly, I must have been drunk," thought he; "that woman must have
intoxicated me with caresses. Good heavens! I was a fool and mad! I risked the
guillotine in a business like that. Fortunately it passed off all right. But if
it had to be done again, I would not do it."
Laurent lost all his vigor. He became inactive, and more cowardly and prudent
than ever. He grew fat and flabby. No one who had studied this great body, piled
up in a lump, apparently without bones or muscles, would ever have had the idea
of accusing the man of violence and cruelty.
He resumed his former habits. For several months, he proved himself a model
clerk, doing his work with exemplary brutishness. At night, he took his meal at
a cheap restaurant in the Rue Saint-Victor, cutting his bread into thin slices,
masticating his food slowly, making his repast last as long as possible. When it
was over, he threw himself back against the wall and smoked his pipe. Anyone
might have taken him for a stout, good-natured father. In the daytime, he
thought of nothing; at night, he reposed in heavy sleep free from dreams. With
his face fat and rosy, his belly full, his brain empty, he felt happy.
His frame seemed dead, and Therese barely entered his mind. Occasionally he
thought of her as one thinks of a woman one has to marry later on, in the
indefinite future. He patiently awaited the time for his marriage, forgetful of
the bride, and dreaming of the new position he would then enjoy. He would leave
his office, he would paint for amusement, and saunter about hither and thither.
These hopes brought him night after night, to the shop in the arcade, in spite
of the vague discomfort he experienced on entering the place.
One Sunday, with nothing to do and being bored, he went to see his old school
friend, the young painter he had lived with for a time. The artist was working
on a picture of a nude Bacchante sprawled on some drapery. The model, lying with
her head thrown back and her torso twisted sometimes laughed and threw her bosom
forward, stretching her arms. As Laurent smoked his pipe and chatted with his
friend, he kept his eyes on the model. He took the woman home with him that
evening and kept her as his mistress for many months. The poor girl fell in love
with him. Every morning she went off and posed as a model all day. Then she came
back each evening. She didn't cost Laurent a penny, keeping herself out of her
own earnings. Laurent never bothered to find out about her, where she went, what
she did. She was a steadying influence in his life, a useful and necessary
thing. He never wondered if he loved her and he never considered that he was
being unfaithful to Therese. He simply felt better and happier.
In the meanwhile the period of mourning that Therese had imposed on herself,
had come to an end, and the young woman put on light-coloured gowns. One
evening, Laurent found her looking younger and handsomer. But he still felt
uncomfortable in her presence. For some time past, she seemed to him feverish,
and full of strange capriciousness, laughing and turning sad without reason.
This unsettled demeanour alarmed him, for he guessed, in part, what her
struggles and troubles must be like.
He began to hesitate, having an atrocious dread of risking his tranquillity.
He was now living peacefully, in wise contentment, and he feared to endanger the
equilibrium of his life, by binding himself to a nervous woman, whose passion
had already driven him crazy. But he did not reason these matters out, he felt
by instinct all the anguish he would be subjected to, if he made Therese his
wife.
The first shock he received, and one that roused him in his sluggishness, was
the thought that he must at length begin to think of his marriage. It was almost
fifteen months since the death of Camille. For an instant, Laurent had the idea
of not marrying at all, of jilting Therese. Then he said to himself that it was
no good killing a man for nothing. In recalling the crime, and the terrible
efforts he had made to be the sole possessor of this woman who was now troubling
him, he felt that the murder would become useless and atrocious should he not
marry her. Besides, was he not bound to Therese by a bond of blood and horror?
Moreover, he feared his accomplice; perhaps, if he failed to marry her, she
would go and relate everything to the judicial authorities out of vengeance and
jealousy. With these ideas beating in his head the fever settled on him again.
Now, one Sunday the model did not return; no doubt she had found a warmer and
more comfortable place to lodge. Laurent was only moderately upset, but he felt
a sudden gap in his life without a woman lying beside him at night. In a week
his passions rebelled and he began spending entire evenings at the shop again.
He watched Therese who was still palpitating from the novels which she read.
After a year of indifferent waiting they both were again tormented by desire.
One evening while shutting up the shop, Laurent spoke to Therese in the passage.
"Do you want me to come to your room to-night," he asked passionately.
She started with fear. "No, let's wait. Let's be prudent."
"It seems to me that I've already waited a long time," he went on. "I'm sick
of waiting."
Therese, her hands and face burning hot, looked at him wildly. She seemed to
hesitate, and then said quickly:
"Let's get married."