THE COMPLETE WORKS OF ÉMILE ZOLA. Эмиль Золя

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      CHAPTER I.

      William and Madeleine got off at Fontenay station. It was a Monday, and the train was almost empty. Five or six fellow-passengers, inhabitants of the district, who were returning home, presented themselves at the platform-exit with the two young people, and dispersed each in his own direction, without bestowing a glance on the surroundings, like folks in a hurry to get home.

      When they were outside the station, the young man offered his arm to the young woman, as though they had not left the streets of Paris. They turned to the left, and went at a leisurely pace up the magnificent avenue of trees which extends from Sceaux to Fontenay. As they ascended, they watched the train at the bottom of the slope start again on its journey with laboured and deep-drawn puffs.

      When it was lost to sight among the trees, William turned towards his companion and said to her with a smile:

      “I told you I am not acquainted with the neighbourhood, and I hardly know for certain where we are going to.”

      “Let us take this path,’’ answered Madeleine, simply, “and then we shall not have to go through the streets of Sceaux.” They took the lane to Champs-Girard. Here, there is a sudden gap in the line of trees bordering the wide avenue which enables one to get a view of the rising ground of Fontenay; down in the bottom, there are gardens and square meadows where huge clumps of poplars rise up straight and full of vigour; then, up the slope, there are cultivated fields, dividing the surface of the country into brown and green tracts, and, right at the top, on the very edge of the horizon, you can catch a glimpse through the trees of the low white houses of the village. Towards the end of September, the sun, as it dips down between four and five o’clock, makes this bit of nature lovely. The young couple, who were alone in the path, stopped instinctively before this nook of landscape, whose dark green — almost black — verdure was hardly yet tinged with the first golden hues of autumn.

      They were still arm in arm. There was between them that indefinable constraint — the result of a newly-formed intimacy — which has made too rapid progress. When they came to think that they had only known each other for eight days at the most, they experienced a sort of uneasy feeling at finding themselves thus alone in presence of each other, in the open fields, like happy lovers. Feeling themselves still strangers and compelled to treat one another as comrades, they hardly dared to look at one another; they conversed only in hesitating sentences, as if from fear of giving mutual offence unwittingly. Each was for the other the unknown — the unknown which terrifies and yet attracts. In the lagging walk like that of lovers, in their pleasant and light words, even in the smiles which they exchanged the moment their eyes met, one could read the uneasiness and embarrassment of two beings whom hazard has unceremoniously brought together. Never had William thought he would suffer so much from his first adventure, and he waited its end with real anguish.

      They had begun to walk on again, easting glances on the hillside, their fits of silence only broken by intermittent conversation, in which they СКАЧАТЬ