The Kill - Emile Zola [85]
Maxime could see her ardent face in the mirror. She lifted herself up even more, and her domino, pulled taut in back, outlined the concavity of her waist and the curve of her hips. The young man followed the line of the satin, which stuck to her like a chemise. Now he too got up and threw away his cigar. He was uneasy and nervous. His customary nonchalance and naturalness were gone.
“Ah! There’s your name, Maxime!” Renée exclaimed. “Listen. . . . I love—”
But he had sat down at the corner of the divan, practically at the young woman’s feet. With a quick movement he managed to grasp her hands. He turned her away from the mirror and in a strange voice said, “Please don’t read that.”
With a nervous laugh she struggled to free herself.
“Why not? Am I not your confidante?”
But he insisted and with a choking voice said, “No, no, not tonight.”
He was still holding on to her, and she tried to free herself by jerking her wrists. They looked at each other with eyes that neither had ever seen before, with a touch of shame in their fixed, forced smiles. She fell to her knees at the end of the divan. They continued to struggle, but she had ceased to pull away toward the mirror and was already surrendering herself. When the young man seized her around the waist, her embarrassed laughter died in her mouth as she said, “Let me go . . . you’re hurting me.”
Not a whisper more escaped her lips. In the deep silence of that room, in which the gaslight seemed to flare up, she felt the earth tremble and heard the clatter of a Batignolles omnibus that must just then have been turning the corner of the boulevard. And then it was over. When they were once again seated side by side on the divan, he punctured their mutual embarrassment by stammering, “Bah! It was bound to happen sooner or later.”
She said nothing. Looking stunned, she stared at the roses in the carpet.
“Had you ever thought about it?” Maxime went on stammering. “I never did, not once. . . . I should have been careful about the private room.”
Yet she had turned sober, as if all the bourgeois rectitude of the Béraud Du Châtels had been aroused by this supreme sin, and with a face looking suddenly old and very grave murmured in a deep voice, “What we’ve just done is vile.”
Gasping for air, she went over to the window, drew the curtains, and leaned out. The orchestra was now a memory. The sin had been committed amid the last quiver of the basses and the distant wail of violins, the muffled sounds of a boulevard now asleep and dreaming of love. The pavement and sidewalks below stretched off into the distance and merged with the gray solitude. All the rumbling carriage wheels seemed to have gone, carrying the light and the crowd off with them. Beneath the window the Café Riche was closed, and not a sliver of light slipped through the shutters. On the other side of the avenue, a shimmering glow was all that still emanated from the façade of the Café Anglais, and in particular from one half-open window through which faint laughter could be heard. And all along this ribbon of darkness, from the bend in the rue Drouot to the other extremity, as far as her eye could see, she perceived only the symmetrical patches where kiosks stained the night red or green without illuminating it, like regularly spaced nightlights in some gigantic dormitory. She raised her head. The upper branches of the trees stood out against a clear sky, while the irregular line of the houses blurred to the point where it resembled masses of rock jutting up along the shore of a bluish sea. But this strip of sky made her sadder