Complete Works of Emile Zola (1040 page)

Then, Jacques, with weary feet fell down beside the line; and, grovelling on the ground, his face buried in the long grass, he burst into convulsive sobs. Great God! So this abominable complaint of which he fancied himself cured, had returned! He had wanted to murder that girl. Kill a woman, kill a woman! This had been ringing in his ears from his earliest youth. He could not deny that he had taken the scissors to stab her. And it was not because she had resisted his embrace. No; it was for the pleasure of the thing, because he had a desire to do so, such a strong desire, that if he had not clutched the grass, he would have returned there, as fast as he could, to butcher her. Her, great God! That Flore whom he had seen grow up, that wild child by whom he had just felt himself so fondly loved! His twisted fingers tore the ground, his sobs rent his throat in a horrifying rattle of despair.

Nevertheless, he did his utmost to become calm. He wanted to understand it all. When he compared himself with others, how did he differ from them? Down there at Plassans, in his youth, he had frequently asked himself the same question. It is true that his mother Gervaise was very young at the time of his birth, barely fifteen and a half; but he was the second. She had only just entered her fourteenth year when his elder brother Claude made his appearance; and neither Claude nor Etienne, who came later, seemed to suffer from having such a child for a mother, or a father as young as herself — that handsome Lantier, whose heartlessness was to cost Gervaise so many tears. Perhaps his two brothers also had his complaint, and said nothing about it. Particularly the elder one, who was dying with such incensement to become painter, that people said he had gone half crazy over his genius.

The family was not at all right, several of its members were wrong in the head. Himself, at certain hours, felt this hereditary flaw. Not that he had bad health, for it was only the apprehension and shame of his attacks that formerly had made him thin. But he was apt to suddenly lose his equilibrium, as if there existed broken places, holes in his being, by which his own self escaped from him amidst a sort of great cloud of smoke that disfigured everything. Then, losing his self-control, he obeyed his muscles, listening to the mad animal within him. Nevertheless, he did not drink, he even deprived himself of an occasional dram of brandy, having remarked that the least drop of alcohol drove him mad. And he began to think that he must be paying for others, the fathers, the grandfathers who had drunk, the generations of drunkards, whose vitiated blood he had inherited. It seemed like slow poison, which reduced him to savagery, taking him back to the depths of the woods, among the wolves, devourers of women.

Jacques had raised himself on an elbow, reflecting, watching the dark entrance to the tunnel. Heaving another great sob, he sank down again, rolling his head on the ground, crying out with grief. That girl, that girl he had wanted to kill! The incident returned to him, acute and frightful, as if the scissors had penetrated his own flesh.

No reasoning appeased him. He had wanted to kill her, he would kill her now, if she happened to be there. He remembered the first time the complaint had shown itself. He was barely sixteen, and one evening, while playing with a young girl, a relative, his junior by a couple of years, she happened to fall, and he at once sprang at her. In the following year he recollected sharpening a knife to bury it in the neck of another girl, a little blonde, whom he noticed pass before his door every morning. This one had a very fat, rosy neck, and he had already selected the place, a beauty spot under one of the ears. Then, there were others, and others still, quite a procession of nightmares, all those whom he had glanced at, with an abrupt desire to murder them. Women he had brushed against in the street, women whom accident made his neighbours, one particularly, a newly married bride seated beside him at the theatre, who laughed very loud, and from whom he had to run away in the middle of an act, so as not to rip her open.

As he did not know them, why was he so furious against them? For, on each occasion, it seemed like a sudden outburst of blind rage, an ever-recurring thirst to avenge some very ancient offences, the exact recollection of which escaped him. Did it date from so far back, from the harm women had done to his race, from the rancour laid up from male to male since the first deceptions at the bottom of the caverns? And, in his access, he also felt the necessity to fight, in order to conquer and subjugate the female, the perverted necessity to throw her dead on his back, like a prey tom from others for ever. His head was bursting in the effort to understand. He could find no answer to his inquiry. Too ignorant, the brain too sluggish, thought he, in this anguish of a man urged to acts wherein his will stood for nothing, and the reason whereof had disappeared from his mind.

A train again passed by with the flash of its lights, and plunged like a thunder-bolt that roars and expires, into the mouth of the tunnel; and Jacques, as if this anonymous, indifferent, and hasty crowd had been able to hear him, stood up, swallowing his sobs and taking an innocent attitude. How many times at the end of one of his attacks, had he started thus, like the guilty, at the least sound? He only lived tranquil and happy, when detached from the world on his locomotive. When the engine bore him along in the trepidation of its wheels at express speed, when he had his hand on the reversing-wheel, and was entirely engaged in watching the metals and looking out for the signals, he ceased thinking, and took deep draughts of the pure air, which always blew a gale. And this was why he was so fond of his engine.

On leaving the École des Arts et Métiers, he selected this occupation of engine-driver, notwithstanding his bright intelligence, for the solitude and distraction it gave him. Without ambition, having in four years attained the position of driver of the first class, he already earned 2,800 frcs. a year, which, coupled with the gratuities he received for economy in fuel and grease, brought the annual amount of his wages up to more than 4,000 frcs., and that satisfied him. He saw his comrades of the second and third class, those instructed by the company, the engine-fitters they took as pupils, he saw almost all of them marry work-girls, women who kept in the background, whom one only occasionally caught sight of at the hour of departure, when they brought the little baskets of provisions; while the ambitious comrades, particularly those who came from a school, waited until they were heads of depots to get married, in the hope of meeting with someone of the middle class, a lady who wore a hat. For his part, he avoided women. What did he care? He would never marry. His only future was to roll along alone, to roll along always, always, without stay.

His chiefs pointed him out as a model driver, who did not drink and who did not run after petticoats. His tipsy comrades made fun of his exaggeration of good conduct, and the others were secretly alarmed when they saw him fall into his silent, melancholy fits, with eyes dim and ashy countenance. How many hours did he recollect having passed, all those hours of freedom, shut up like a monk in his cell, in that little room in the Rue Cardinet, whence the depot at Batignolles, to which his engine belonged, could be seen.

Jacques made an effort to rise. What was he doing there in the grass, on this mild and hazy winter night? The country remained plunged in shadow. There was only light above, where the moon lit up the thin fog, the immense ground-glass-like cupola which concealed it from view, with a pale yellow reflex. Below, the black earth slumbered in the immobility of death. Come! it must be near nine o’clock. The best thing to do would be to return to the house, and go to bed. But, in his torpor, he saw himself back at the Misards, ascending the staircase to the loft, stretching himself on the hay against the plank partition separating him from the room occupied by Flore. She would be there, he would hear her breathing; and, as he was aware that she never locked her door, he would be able to join her. His shivering fit returned. He was racked again with such a violent sob at the image of this girl, that he once more sank to the ground.

He had wanted to kill her — wanted to kill her! Great God! He was choking in anguish at the thought that he would go and kill her in her bed, presently, if he returned to the house. He might well be without a weapon; he might cover his head with his two arms to render himself powerless, but he felt that the male, independent of his own will, would thrust open the door and strangle the girl, urged to the crime by a thirst to avenge the ancient wrong. No, no! He had better pass the night beating about the neighbourhood, than return there. Bounding to his feet he fled again.

Then, once more, for half an hour, he tore across the dark country as if an unchained pack of devils followed howling at his heels. He ascended the hills, he plunged down into the narrow gorges. He went through two streams, one after the other, drenching himself to the hips. A bush, barring his progress, exasperated him. His only thought was to go straight on, further, still further, to flee, to flee from the other one, the mad animal he felt within him; but the beast accompanied him, it flew along as fast as he did. For months he had fancied he had driven it from him; he had pursued the same life as other people; and, now, he had to begin again, he would have to resume the struggle to prevent the brute leaping upon the first woman he chanced to brush against in the street.

Nevertheless, the intense silence and vast solitude appeased him a little, and made him dream of a life as mute and lonely as this desolate land, where he would stroll about always, without ever meeting a soul. He must have turned round without noticing it, for he found himself kicking against the metals on the opposite side of the line, after describing a wide circle among the slopes, bristling with bushes, above the tunnel. He started back in the irritable uneasiness of once more falling upon the living. Then, with the intention of taking a short cut behind a hillock, he lost his way, to find it again before the railway hedge, just at the exit from the tunnel on the down-line, opposite the field where he had been sobbing a short time previously; and, tired to death, he remained motionless, when the thunder of a train issuing from the bowels of the earth, at first slight, but becoming louder and louder every second, attracted his attention. It was the Havre express which had left Paris at 6.30 and passed by there at 9.25; the train he drove every two days.

Jacques first of all saw the dark mouth of the tunnel lit up, like the opening to an oven ablaze with faggots. Then the engine burst out with a tremendous crash amidst the dazzling splendour of its great round eye the lantern in front whose fire bored into the country, illuminating the metals for a long way ahead, with a double line of flame. It came like a thunderbolt; the carriages followed one another immediately afterwards, the small square windows of the doors, brilliant with luminosity, displayed compartments full of travellers, flying past at such a whirling speed, that there afterwards remained a doubt in the mind of the spectator, as to what the eye had seen.

And Jacques, very distinctly, at that precise quarter of a second, perceived through the flaming glass of a coupé window, one man holding another down on the seat, and plunging a knife into his throat; while a dark heap, perhaps a third person, perhaps some articles of luggage fallen from the rack, weighed with all its weight on the convulsed legs of the victim. But the train had already dashed past, and was disappearing in the direction of La Croix-de-Maufras, displaying naught of itself in the dense obscurity, but the three lights at the back — the red triangle.

The young man, riveted to the spot, followed the train with his eyes as its thunder gradually died away, leaving the deathlike peacefulness of the surroundings undisturbed. Was he sure he had seen what he thought? And now he hesitated. He no longer dared affirm the reality of this vision which came and went in a flash. Not one single feature of the two actors in the drama remained vivid. The dark heap must have been a travelling-rug that had fallen across the body of the victim. Nevertheless, he thought he had first of all caught sight of a pale profile beneath waves of thick hair. But all this became confused, and evaporated as in a dream. For an instant, the profile he had evoked reappeared, and then definitely vanished. Doubtless it was nothing more than imagination; and all this gave him an icy chill. It seemed to him so extraordinary, that at last he admitted he must have been the victim of hallucination, due to the frightful crisis he had just passed through.

Jacques walked about for nearly another hour, his head loaded with confused thoughts. He felt broken down, but relief came, and his fever left him. He ended by turning in the direction of La Croix-de-Maufras, but without having decided to do so. Then when he found himself before the house of the gate-keeper, he was determined he would not go in, that he would sleep in the little shed built against one of the walls. But a ray of light passed under the door, and pushing it open, without giving a thought to what he was doing, a strange sight stopped him on the threshold.

Misard had disturbed the butter-jar in the corner, and, on the ground on all fours, a lighted lantern beside him, he was sounding the wall with little taps of the knuckle, searching. The noise made by the door opening, made him stand up, but he did not show the least confusion. He merely remarked in the most natural tone of voice imaginable:

“Some matches have fallen down.”

And when he had put the butter-jar back in its place, he added:

“I came to fetch my lantern, because a little while ago, as I came along, I perceived a man stretched across the line, and I believe he’s dead.”

Jacques, at first struck at the idea of surprising Misard searching for the hoard of Aunt Phasie, which abruptly transformed his doubt respecting the accusations of the latter into certainty, was then so violently upset by this news of the discovery of a corpse, that he forgot the other drama — the one that was being performed there, in this little out-of-the-way dwelling. The scene in the coupé, the brief vision of one man slaughtering another, returned to him in a vivid flash.