"What I am going to do, you will see, well enough. And listen, what I am going to do, I mean you to do with me. In that way we shall remain together. There will be something binding between us."
He terrified her. She drew back again.
"No, no; I want to know!" she exclaimed. "I will not write without knowing."
Then, ceasing to speak, he took her hand—the small, delicate hand of a child, and pressed it in his iron fist, with the continuous pressure of a vice, until he almost crushed it. He was driving his will into her flesh with the pain. She uttered a cry. All her spirit was broken, all her will surrendered. Ignorant creature as she had remained, in her passive gentleness, she could but obey. Instrument of love, instrument of death.
"Write, write!" he repeated again.
And she wrote painfully, with her poor, sore hand.
"That's all right; you are very good," said he, when he had the letter. "Now tidy the place up a bit, and get everything ready. I'll come back and fetch you."
He was quite calm. He arranged the bow of his tie before the looking-glass, put on his hat, and took himself off. She heard him double-lock the door, and remove the key. Night was drawing in more and more. For an instant she remained seated, her ear catching every sound outside. A continual, low whine came from the adjoining room in occupation of the newspaper woman: no doubt a little dog forgotten by its mistress. Below, in the apartment of the Dauvergnes, the piano had become silent. There was now a merry clatter of stewpans and crockery. The two little housekeepers were busy in their kitchen, Claire looking after a mutton stew, Sophie picking a salad. And Séverine, prostrated, listened to their laughter in the frightful distress of this falling night.
At a quarter past six, the locomotive of the Havre express, issuing from the Pont de l'Europe, was switched on to its train and there secured. Owing to the metals being occupied, they had been unable to lodge this train under the marquee of the main lines. It waited in the open air beside a prolongation of the platform forming a sort of narrow jetty, in the gloom of an inky sky, where the poorly furnished row of gas lamps displayed but a line of smoky stars.
A shower had just ceased, leaving behind a trace of icy dampness spread over this vast uncovered space, which the mist threw back as far as the pale glimmers on the façades in the Rue de Rome. This immense, dreary expanse, bathed in water, here and there studded with a gory light, was broken up by opaque lumps, engines, and solitary carriages, parts of trains in repose on the shunting lines. And from the depths of this sheet of darkness came sounds,—giant-like respirations, breathless with fever, whistles resembling the piercing shrieks of women, distant, lamentable blasts of horns mingled with a rumble in the adjoining streets. Orders were shouted out to add on a carriage. The engine of the express stood motionless, losing by a valve a great jet of steam, which ascended into all this obscurity to spread into small clouds and sprinkle the boundless veil of mourning drawn across the sky with white tears.