The Kill - Emile Zola [86]
On turning away from the window, Renée saw Charles snooping around and sniffing the air. He soon noticed the young woman’s blue ribbon, lying crumpled and forgotten on a corner of the divan. Affecting politeness, he hastened to hand it to her. His gesture brought home to her a full awareness of her shame. Standing in front of the mirror, she attempted to retie the ribbon, but her hands were clumsy. Her chignon had fallen, her little curls all lay flattened against her temples, and she could not manage to tie a bow. Charles came to her assistance, and sounding as though he were offering her some everyday item such as a finger bowl or toothpick, he asked, “Would madame like the comb?”
“No, don’t bother with that,” Maxime interrupted, fixing the waiter with an impatient stare. “Go fetch us a cab.”
Renée decided just to pull up the hood of her domino. As she was about to walk away from the mirror, she raised herself up slightly to look for the words that Maxime’s embrace had prevented her from reading. Slanting upward toward the ceiling and written in a large, abominable hand was this declaration, signed “Sylvia”: “I love Maxime.” She pressed her lips together and pulled her hood up a little bit more.
In the carriage they felt horribly awkward. As on the trip down from the Parc Monceau, they sat facing each other, but neither could think of anything to say. The darkness in the cab was opaque, and now there was not even a red dot of light from Maxime’s cigar, a glowing orange ember. The young man, once again “up to his eyes” in skirts, suffered from this darkness, this silence, and this mute young woman, whose presence he felt near him and whose eyes he imagined wide open to the night. So as to seem less stupid, he finally sought her hand, and when he held it in his own he felt relieved and found the situation tolerable. That hand surrendered itself to him, soft and as if in a dream.
The cab crossed the place Madeleine. Renée was thinking that she had done nothing wrong. She hadn’t wanted the incest. The more deeply she examined herself, the more innocent she found herself to be—during the first hours of her escapade, in her furtive exit through the Parc Monceau, at Blanche Muller’s, on the boulevard, and even in the restaurant’s private room. Why, then, had she fallen to her knees next to the divan? She was no longer sure. She certainly had not given a second’s thought to that. She would have angrily refused. It had all been for laughs, for fun, nothing more. As the cab drove on, she thought back on that deafening boulevard orchestra and the steady stream of men and women who came and went while tongues of fire burned her weary eyes.
Maxime, in his corner, was also dreaming, not without a certain irritation. The adventure had made him angry. He blamed the black satin domino. Had anyone ever seen a woman done up like that before? You couldn’t even see her neck. He had mistaken her for a boy, he’d been playing with her, and it wasn’t his fault if things had taken a serious turn. He certainly wouldn’t have touched her with his fingertips if she’d shown even a bit of shoulder. He would have remembered that