Complete Works of Emile Zola (352 page)

‘It is a very strange story!’ she said; ‘there is something more in it than I can understand.’

She knew Macquart, and she guessed that there must be some rascality in it all from the expression of delight which she could detect in his eyes.

‘You are a strange person,’ said he, pretending to get vexed in order to bring Madame Rougon’s scrutiny to an end; ‘you are always imagining something extraordinary. I can only tell you what I know. I love Marthe more than you do, and I have never done anything that wasn’t for her good. Shall I go for the doctor? I will at once, if you like.’

Madame Rougon watched him closely. She even ques­tioned Rose at great length, without succeeding, however, in learning anything further. After all, she seemed glad to have her daughter with her, and spoke with great bitterness of people who would leave you to die on
your own doorstep without even taking the trouble to open the door. And meantime Marthe, with her head thrown back upon her pillow, was indeed dying.

CHAPTER XXII

It was perfectly dark in the cell at Les Tulettes. A draught of cold air awoke Mouret from the cataleptic stupor into which his violence earlier in the evening had thrown him. He re­mained lying against the wall in perfect stillness for a few moments, his eyes staring widely; then he began to roll his head gently on the cold stone, wailing like a child just awakened from sleep. But the current of chill damp air swept against his legs, and he rose and looked around him to see whence it came. In front of him he saw the door of his cell wide open.

‘She has left the door open,’ said he aloud; ‘she will be expecting me. I must be off.’

He went out, and then came back and felt his clothes after the manner of a methodical man who is afraid of forgetting something, and finally he carefully closed the door behind him. He passed through the first court with an easy uncon­cerned gait as though he were merely taking a stroll. As he was entering the second one, he caught sight of a warder who seemed to be on the watch. He stopped and deliberated for a moment. But, the warder having disappeared, he crossed the court and reached another door, which led to the open country. He closed it behind him without any appearance of astonishment or haste.

‘She is a good woman all the same,’ he murmured. ‘She must have heard me calling her. It must be getting late. I will go home at once for fear they should feel uneasy.’

He struck out along a path. It seemed quite natural to him to find himself among the open fields. When he had gone a hundred yards he had altogether forgotten that Les Tulettes was behind him, and imagined that he had just left a vine-grower from whom he had purchased fifty hogsheads of wine. When he reached a spot where five
roads met, he recognised where he was, and began to laugh as he said to himself:

‘What a goose I am! I was going up the hill towards Saint-Eutrope; it is to the left I must turn. I shall be at Plassans in a good hour and a half.’

Then he went merrily along the high-road, looking at each of the mile-stones as at an old acquaintance. He stopped for a moment before certain fields and country-houses with an air of interest. The sky was of an ashy hue, streaked with broad rosy bands that lighted up the night like dying embers. Heavy drops of rain began to fall; the wind was blowing from the east and was full of moisture.

‘Hallo!’ said Mouret, looking up at the sky uneasily, ‘I mustn’t stop loitering. The wind is in the east, and there’s going to be a pretty downpour. I shall never be able to reach Plassans before it begins; and I’m not well wrapped up either.’

He gathered round his breast the thick grey woollen waist­coat which he had torn at Les Tulettes. He had a bad bruise on his jaw to which he raised his hand without heeding the sharp pain which it caused him. The high-road was quite deserted, and he only met a cart going down a hill at a leisurely pace. The driver was dozing, and made no response to his friendly good-night. The rain did not overtake him till he reached the bridge across the Viorne. It distressed him very much, and he went to take shelter under the bridge, grumbling that it was quite impossible to go on through such weather, that nothing ruined clothes so much as rain, and that if he had known what was coming he would have brought an umbrella. He waited patiently for a long half-hour, amusing himself by listening to the streaming of the downpour; then, when it was over, he returned to the high­road, and at last reached Plassans, ever taking the greatest care to keep himself from getting splashed with mud.

It was nearly midnight, though Mouret calculated that it could scarcely yet be eight o’clock. He passed through the deserted streets, feeling quite distressed that he had kept his wife waiting such a long time.

‘She won’t be able to understand it,’ he thought. ‘The dinner will be quite cold. Ah! I shall get a nice reception from Rose.’

At last he reached the Rue Balande and stood before his own door.

‘Ah!’ he said, ‘I have not got my latchkey.’

He did not knock at the door, however. The kitchen window was quite dark, and the other windows in the front were equally void of all sign of life. A sense of deep suspicion then took possession of the madman; with an instinct that was quite animal-like, he scented danger. He stepped back into the shadow of the neighbouring houses, and again examined the house-front; then he seemed to come to a decision, and went round into the Impasse des Chevillottes. But the little door that led into the garden was bolted. At this, impelled by sudden rage, he threw himself against it with tremendous force, and the door, rotted by damp, broke into two pieces. For a moment the violence of the shock almost stunned Mouret, and rendered him unconscious of why he had broken down the door, which he tried to mend again by joining the broken pieces.

‘That’s a nice thing to have done, when I might so easily have knocked,’ he said with a sudden pang of regret. ‘It will cost me at least thirty francs to get a new door.’

He was now in the garden. As he raised his head and saw the bedroom on the first floor brightly lighted, he came to the conclusion that his wife was going to bed. This caused him great astonishment, and he muttered that he must certainly have dropped off to sleep under the bridge while he was wait­ing for the rain to stop. It must be very late, he thought. The windows of the neighbouring houses, Monsieur Rastoil’s as well as those of the Sub-Prefecture, were in darkness. Then he again fixed his eyes upon his own house as he caught sight of the glow of a lamp on the second floor behind Abbé Faujas’s thick curtains. That glow was like a flaming eye, and seemed to scorch him. He pressed his brow with his burning hands, and his head grew dizzy, racked by some horrible recollection like a vague nightmare, in which nothing was clearly defined, but which seemed to apply to some long­standing danger to himself and his family — a danger which grew and increased in horror, and threatened to swallow up the house unless he could do something to save it.

‘Marthe, Marthe, where are you?’ he stammered in an undertone. ‘Come and bring away the children.’

He looked about him for Marthe. He could no longer recognise the garden. It seemed to him to be larger; to be empty and grey and like a cemetery. The big box-plants had vanished, the lettuces were no longer there, the fruit-trees had disappeared. He turned round again, came back, and knelt down to see if the slugs had eaten everything up. The disappearance of the box-plants, the death of their lofty greenery, caused him an especial pang, as though some of the actual life of the house had departed. Who was it that had killed them? What villain had been there uprooting everything and tearing away even the tufts of violets which he had planted at the foot of the terrace? Indignation arose in him as he contemplated all this ruin.

‘Marthe, Marthe, where are you?’ he called again.

He looked for her in the little conservatory to the right of the terrace. It was littered with the dead dry corpses of the box-plants. They were piled up in bundles amidst the stumps of the fruit-trees. In one corner was Désirée’s bird-cage, hanging from a nail, with the door broken off and the wire-work sadly torn. The madman stepped back, overwhelmed with fear as though he had opened the door of a vault. Stammering, his throat on fire, he went back to the terrace and paced up and down before the door and the shuttered windows. His increasing rage gave his limbs the suppleness of a wild beast’s. He braced himself up and stepped along noiselessly, trying to find some opening. An air-hole into the cellar was sufficient for him. He squeezed himself together and glided inside with the nimbleness of a cat, scraping the wall with his nails as he went. At last he was in the house.

The cellar door was only latched. He made his way through the darkness of the hall, groping past the walls with his hands, and pushing the kitchen door open. Some matches were on a shelf at the left. He went straight to this shelf, and struck a light to enable him to get a lamp which stood upon the mantelpiece without breaking anything. Then he looked about him. There appeared to have been a big meal there that evening. The kitchen was in a state of festive disorder. The table was strewn with dirty plates and dishes and glasses. There was a litter of pans, still warm, on the sink and the chairs and the very floor. A coffee-pot that had been forgotten was also boiling away beside the stove, slightly tilted like a tipsy man. Mouret put it straight and then tidily arranged the pans. He smelt them, sniffed at the drops of liquor that remained in the glasses, and counted the dishes and plates with growing irritation. This was no longer his quiet orderly kitchen; it seemed as if a hotelful of food had been wasted there. All this guzzling disorder reeked of indigestion.

‘Marthe! Marthe!’ he again repeated as he returned into the passage, carrying the lamp as he went; ‘answer me, tell me where they have shut you up. We must be off, we must be off at once.’

He searched for her in the dining-room. The two cup­boards to the right and left of the stove were open. From a burst bag of grey paper on the edge of a shelf some lumps of sugar had fallen upon the floor. Higher up Mouret could see a bottle of brandy with the neck broken and plugged with a piece of rag. Then he got upon a chair to examine the cupboards. They were half empty. The jars of preserved fruits had been attacked, the jam-pots had been opened and the jam tasted, the fruit had been nibbled, the provisions of all kinds had been gnawed and fouled as though a whole army of rats had been there. Not being able to find Marthe in the closets, Mouret searched all over the room, looking behind the curtains and even underneath the furniture. Fragments of bone and pieces of broken bread lay about the floor; there were marks on the table that had been left by sticky glasses. Then he crossed the hall and went to look for Marthe in the drawing-room. But, as soon as he opened the door, he stopped short. This could not really be his own drawing-room. The bright mauve paper, the red-flowered carpet, the new easy-chairs covered with cerise damask, filled him with amazement. He was afraid to enter a room that did not belong to him, and he closed the door.

‘Marthe! Marthe!’ he stammered again in accents of despair.

He went back to the middle of the hall, unable to quiet the hoarse panting which was swelling in his throat. Where had he got to, that he could not recognise a single spot? Who had been transforming his house in such a way? His recollections were quite confused. He could only recall some shadows gliding along the hall; two shadows, at first poverty-stricken, soft-spoken, self-suppressing, then tipsy and disrepu­table-looking; two shadows that leered and sniggered. He raised his lamp, the wick of which was burning smokily, and thereupon the shadows grew bigger, lengthened upon the walls, mounted aloft beside the staircase and filled and preyed upon the whole house. Some horrid filth, some fermenting putrescence had found its way into the place and had rotted the woodwork, rusted the iron and split the walls. Then he seemed to hear the house crumbling like a ceiling from dampness, and to see it melting like a handful of salt thrown into a basin of hot water.

But up above there sounded peals of ringing laughter which made his hair stand on end. He put the lamp down and went upstairs to look for Marthe. He crept up noise­lessly on his hands and knees with all the nimbleness and stealth of a wolf. When he reached the landing of the first floor, he knelt down in front of the door of the bedroom. A ray of light streamed from underneath it. Marthe must be going to bed.

‘What a jolly bed this is of theirs!’ Olympe was just ex­claiming;’ you can quite bury yourself in it, Honoré; I am right up to my eyes in feathers.’

She laughed and stretched herself and sprang about amidst the bed-clothes.

‘Ever since I’ve been here,’ she continued, ‘I’ve been longing to sleep in this bed. It made me almost ill wishing for it. I could never see that lath of a landlady of ours get into it without feeling a furious desire to throw her on to the floor and put myself in her place. One gets quite warm directly. It’s just as though I were wrapped in cotton-wool.’

Trouche, who had not yet gone to bed, was examining the bottles on the dressing-table.

‘She has got all kinds of scents,’ he said.

‘Well, as she isn’t here, we may just as well treat our­selves to the best room!’ continued Olympe. ‘There’s no danger of her coming back and disturbing us. I have fastened the doors up. You will be getting cold, Honoré.’

But Trouche now opened the drawers and began groping about amongst the linen.

‘Put this on, it’s smothered with lace,’ he said, tossing a night-dress to Olympe. ‘I shall wear this red handkerchief myself.’

Then, as Trouche was at last getting into bed, Olympe said to him:

‘Put the grog on the night-table. We need not get up and go to the other end of the room for it. There, my dear, we are like real householders now!’

They lay down side by side, with the eider-down quilt drawn up to their chins.

‘I ate a deuced lot this evening,’ said Trouche after a short pause.

‘And drank a lot, too!’ added Olympe with a laugh. ‘I feel very cosy and snug. But the tiresome part is that my mother is always interfering with us. She has been quite awful to-day. I can’t take a single step about the house without her being at me. There’s really no advantage in our landlady going off if mother means to play the policeman. She has quite spoilt my day’s enjoyment.’