Therese Raquin - Emile Zola [42]
Then Laurent got up and grasped Camille around the waist. The clerk started to laugh.
‘No, don’t! You’re tickling me,’ he said. ‘Stop messing around ... Seriously, you’ll make me fall.’
Laurent grasped him harder and shook him. Camille turned and saw the terrifying, contorted face of his friend. He could not understand what was going on, but was gripped by a vague sense of terror. He tried to cry out and felt a rough hand around his throat. With the instinct of a struggling animal, he got up on his knees and gripped the side of the boat. For a few seconds, he struggled like that.
‘Thérèse! Thérèse!’ he called, in a whistling, half-suffocated voice.
The young woman watched, gripping a bench in the skiff with both hands as it creaked and swayed on the river. She could not shut her eyes. A terrifying contraction kept them wide open, staring at the dreadful scene of struggle. She was silent and rigid.
‘Thérèse! Thérèse!’ the unfortunate victim cried, croaking.
At this final plea, Thérèse burst into tears. Her nerves broke and the crisis that she had been anticipating threw her shaking into the bottom of the boat. There she stayed, bent double, swooning, lifeless.
Laurent was still shaking Camille, with one hand gripped around his throat. Eventually, he managed to prise him away from the side of the boat with his other hand. He held him up like a child in his powerful arms. As he bent his head forward, leaving his neck uncovered, his victim, mad with fear and fury, twisted round, bared his teeth and dug them into the neck. And when the murderer, choking back a cry of pain, briskly threw Camille into the river, his teeth took away a piece of flesh.
He fell into the water with a scream. He came back to the surface two or three more times, giving increasingly muffled cries.
Laurent did not waste a second. He turned up the collar of his jacket to hide the wound. Then he grasped the swooning Thérèse, turned the skiff over with a kick and let himself fall into the Seine with his mistress in his arms. He supported her in the water, calling for help in a pathetic voice.
The oarsmen, whose singing they had heard behind the island, rowed swiftly towards them. They realized that a disaster had taken place: they set about rescuing Thérèse, lying her down on a bench, and Laurent, who began to lament the death of his friend. He jumped back in the water, looked for Camille in places where he could not be, came back weeping, wringing his hands and tearing out his hair. The oarsmen tried to calm him and console him.
‘It’s my fault,’ he cried. ‘I shouldn’t have let the poor lad dance around and shake the boat as he did ... Suddenly, we were all three of us on the same side, and we capsized. As he was falling, he called out to me to save his wife ...’
As always happens, there were two or three young people among the oarsmen who claimed to have witnessed the accident.
‘We saw it clearly,’ they said. ‘Heavens, you know, a boat is not as solid as a dance floor ... Oh, this poor little woman, it’ll be frightful for her when she comes round!’
They picked up their oars, took the skiff in tow and brought Thérèse and Laurent to the restaurant, where the dinner was waiting. In a few minutes, all of Saint-Ouen knew about the accident. The oarsmen described it as though they were eyewitnesses. A sympathetic crowd gathered around the cabaret.
The restaurant owner and his wife were good people, who made some spare clothes available to the shipwrecked pair. When Thérèse revived, she had a nervous crisis and burst into terrible sobs. She had to be put to bed. Nature was assisting in the sinister piece of play-acting that had just taken place.
When the young woman was calmer, Laurent entrusted her to the care of the restaurant owners. He wanted to go back to Paris alone, to tell Mme Raquin the dreadful news, softening the blow as much as possible. The truth was that he was mistrustful of Thérèse’s nervous excitement. He wanted to give her time to think things over and learn