Therese Raquin - Emile Zola [36]
Nothing came to him. As he had told his mistress, he was not a child or an idiot. He did not want to use a dagger or poison. He needed a sly, cunning sort of crime, one that involved no danger, a kind of sinister snuffing out, without screams or terror — a simple disappearance. Even though he was shaken and driven forward by passion, his whole being imperiously demanded caution. He was too much of a coward, too much of a sensualist, to risk his own tranquillity. He was killing in order to live in peace and happiness.
Little by little, sleep overcame him. The cold air had driven the warm, sweet-smelling ghost of Thérèse out of the attic. Exhausted, calmed, Laurent allowed a kind of vague, gentle numbness to sweep over him. As he was falling asleep, he decided to wait for a suitable opportunity, and his mind, growing drowsier and drowsier, cradled him with the thought: ‘I shall kill him, I shall kill him.’ In five minutes, he was at rest, breathing with untroubled regularity.
Thérèse had got home at eleven. She arrived at the Passage du Pont-Neuf, her head burning and her mind racing, without any knowledge of the journey she had taken. Her ears were so full of the words she had heard that she felt as though she had just come down the stairs from Laurent’s room. She found Mme Raquin and Camille anxious and full of concern. She answered all their questions curtly, telling them that she had had a useless journey and stayed for an hour waiting for an omnibus.
When she got into bed, the clothes felt cold and damp. Her limbs, still burning, shivered in repulsion. Camille soon went to sleep and for a long time Thérèse looked at the pale face idiotically resting on the pillow, with its mouth open. She moved away from him and felt an urge to stick her clenched fist into that mouth.
X
Almost three weeks went by. Laurent came back to the shop every evening. He seemed weary, as though sick. There was a faint, bluish circle around his eyes, while his lips were pale and cracked. But otherwise, he still had his usual heavy passivity about him; he looked Camille straight in the face and behaved in the same open, friendly way. Mme Raquin spoiled the family friend even more, seeing him relapse into a sort of dull fever.
Thérèse had resumed her dumb, sullen look. She was more unmoving, more impenetrable and more passive than ever. It seemed that Laurent did not exist for her; she hardly glanced at him, spoke to him only occasionally and treated him with utter indifference. Mme Raquin, whose good nature was pained by this attitude, would sometimes tell the young man: ‘Take no notice of my niece’s coldness. Her face looks unfriendly, I know, but her heart is warm with every kind of affection and devotion.’
The two lovers no longer made any assignations. Since the day at the Rue Saint-Victor, they had not once met alone. In the evening, when they were face to face, apparently calm and indifferent to one another, waves of passion, terror and desire seethed beneath the unruffled surfaces of their faces. And inside Thérèse there were moments of fury, baseness and cruel sneering, while in Laurent there was dark brutality and anguished indecision. They themselves did not dare to look into the depths of their beings, to plumb this feverish unrest that filled their brains with a kind of thick, acrid vapour.
When they could, behind a door, without saying a word, they would exchange a brief, rough grasp of hands. They would have liked to carry off shreds