The Beast Within - Emile Zola [101]
‘Can we get away from the street?’ Séverine suggested. ‘These crowds make me feel giddy.’
Jacques too wanted to find somewhere quieter. Without realizing it, he wanted to have her more to himself, to be away from all these people.
They were walking past the entrance to a little park.4
‘What about here?’ he said. ‘Come on, let’s go in.’
They walked slowly down the path along the edge of the lawn, beneath the bare trees. There were a few mothers taking their young children for a walk and people, obviously in a hurry, using the park as a short cut. They crossed the stream and walked up through the rock gardens. They turned to come back, not knowing quite what to do next. They wandered through a clump of pine trees, whose evergreen foliage shone dark green in the sunlight. There happened to be a bench there, in a quiet corner hidden from view. Without exchanging a word, they sat down, seemingly led to this spot by some mutual understanding.
‘What a lovely day it is now,’ she said, in an effort to break the silence.
‘Yes,’ he answered, ‘the sun’s come out again.’
But their minds were on other things. Jacques, who normally avoided the company of women, had been pondering the chain of events that had brought him and Séverine together. Here she was, sitting next to him, touching him, threatening to invade his life. How had it happened? Ever since the last interview with the examining magistrate at Rouen, he had absolutely no doubt that she had been an accomplice in the murder at La Croix-de-Maufras. But how had she come to do such a thing? What passion or motive had driven her? He had asked himself again and again, without ever finding any obvious answer. Eventually, he had worked out a possible explanation, based on a self-seeking and violent husband who sought to get his hands on the legacy as soon as possible, fearing the will might be changed to their disadvantage and perhaps thinking that his relationship with his wife might be strengthened by a shared act of murder. This was the only explanation that seemed to make any sense; it left many questions unanswered, and they intrigued him, but he hadn’t attempted to pursue them further. He had also been in two minds whether it wasn’t his duty to tell the law what he knew, and it was this that was uppermost in his mind as he sat beside her on the park bench, so close in fact that he could feel the warmth of her thigh against his.
‘It’s amazing to be able to sit outside like this in March,’ he said. ‘It’s like summer.’
‘Yes!’ she replied. ‘The minute the sun comes out you can feel it.’
Séverine, for her part, was thinking that Jacques would have to be unbelievably stupid not to realize that they were guilty. It must have been so obvious how they had tried to win him over; even now, she knew that she was sitting too close to him. In the silences which punctuated their banal conversation, she tried to gauge his thoughts. Their eyes met briefly. She could tell that he was wondering whether the black shape he had seen in the train had indeed been her, pinning down the victim’s legs with all her strength. What could she do, what could she say that would bind him to her irrevocably?
‘It was very cold in Le Havre this morning,’ she said.
‘There was a lot of rain, too,’ he replied.
Séverine had a sudden inspiration. She didn’t stop to reflect or think about it; it came to her instinctively, from somewhere deep within her psyche. Had she stopped to give it thought, she would have said nothing; she simply felt that it was the right thing to do. She could win him over merely by talking to him.
She gently took his hand in hers and looked at him. They were hidden from passers-by in the nearby street by the green covering of trees. The only sound to be heard was the distant rumble of traffic, reaching them faintly in the sunlit solitude of the