Jacques listened with amusement to her protestations that she had no time for lovers.
‘What about Ozil?’ he asked. ‘Is the wedding off? I heard you used to run through the tunnel every day to see him.’
She shrugged her shoulders.
‘Wedding, my foot!’ she said. ‘I run through the tunnel because I like it! Two and a half kilometres in the dark! If you didn’t watch out you’d get cut to pieces by a train! You should hear the noise they make inside! Ozil was starting to get on my nerves. He’s not the man for me.’
‘Are you looking for somebody else, then?’ Jacques ventured.
She hesitated.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Certainly not.’
She started to laugh. She had become suddenly embarrassed and started untying a particularly awkward knot.
‘What about you?’ she asked without looking up, as if absorbed in her task, ‘Have you got a girlfriend?’
Jacques became more serious. He looked away, staring unsteadily into the night.
‘No,’ he said tersely.
‘So it’s true what they say, then,’ she continued. ‘That you can’t stand women. Come on, Jacques, I’ve known you long enough; you haven’t got a kind word to say for us. What have we done to upset you?’
He made no answer. She pondered a moment, put down the knot that she was trying to untie and looked at him.
‘Is it true that the only thing you’re in love with is your locomotive?’ she asked him. ‘Everybody makes jokes about it. They say you’re always polishing it and making it look shiny. They say it’s the only thing you really care about. I’m only telling you, Jacques, because I’m your friend.’
He looked at her as she sat in front of him, in the pale, misty light from the moon. He remembered when she was a little girl, boisterous and headstrong even then, flinging her arms round his neck the minute he came home and clinging to him in childish glee. Later they had gone their separate ways. Each time he met her again he noticed how much she had grown. Yet she would still fling her arms round him as before and gaze at him lovingly with her big bright eyes. Jacques found it more and more embarrassing. And now, she was a fully grown woman, handsome, desirable. She had loved him, he imagined, from the earliest days of her childhood. His heart began to beat quickly. He suddenly felt that he was the one she had been waiting for. The blood rushed to his head; he felt that it would burst. In the confusion that came over him, his first impulse was to flee. Desire had always driven him mad. He saw red.
‘Sit beside me, Jacques,’ she said.
He remained standing where he was, not knowing what to do. Suddenly his legs felt very tired. Then, yielding to the insistent call of his desire, he dropped to the ground beside her on the pile of twine. He could not speak; his throat was dry. Flore, normally so distant, so taciturn, chatted away ten to the dozen, till her head was in a whirl.
‘Mother made a mistake marrying Misard,’ she said. ‘It’ll do her no good ... I couldn’t care less ... I’ve got enough on my plate. Whenever I try to help she tells me to mind my own business ... So she can sort it out herself. I keep out of the house. I think about all the things I’m going to do. I saw you go past on your train this morning. I was sitting over there in those bushes, but you never look. I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. Not now. Another day perhaps ... when we’re best friends.’
She had dropped her scissors. Still without speaking, Jacques took her two hands in his. She thrilled to his touch. But the minute he raised her hands to his burning lips, she recoiled from him in horror, like an untouched virgin. In an instant she was again the Amazon, the despiser of men, defiant, hostile, spurning his advance.
‘Leave me alone,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to. Let’s just sit quietly ... That’s all you men ever think of! You wouldn’t believe what Louisette told me the day she died at Cabuche’s! Not that it was anything I didn’t know already. I’ve seen the President up to his dirty tricks with girls. He used to bring them here. There’s one that nobody knows about. He married her off.’
Jacques was no longer listening to her; her words fell on deaf ears. He seized her in a violent embrace and fastened his lips to hers. She gave a small cry, a moan, so deep, so tender, so clearly betraying the long-concealed love she bore him. Yet still she fought against him, blindly, instinctively refusing to yield. She desired him, yet she resisted him. She needed him to conquer her. They did not speak. They remained locked together, breast to breast, each trying desperately to overpower the other. It appeared briefly that she might be the stronger. He was beginning to weaken, and she had almost managed to pin him down beneath her when he grabbed her by the throat. He tore open her bodice, exposing her breasts, hard and swollen from the struggle, milky white in the pale light of the moon. She fell to the ground on her back and surrendered herself to him, defeated.
But he did not take her. He drew back, gasping for breath, looking at her. He seemed to be possessed; some wild impulse made him look around him for a weapon, a stone, anything that he might use to kill her. His eyes fell upon the scissors glinting in the moonlight among the pieces of twine that she had been cutting. He grabbed them and was on the point of plunging them into her body between the two rose-tipped white breasts when a chill ran through him and his mind suddenly became clear. He threw the scissors to the ground and fled from her, horrified. Flore lay with her eyes closed, thinking that he had rejected her because she had resisted him.
Jacques ran off into the night. He followed a path which led up a hill and then back down into a narrow dell, running as fast as he could. His feet sent stones clattering noisily down the path in front of him. He swerved off to the left into the bushes and then went right again, coming out on to a bare hilltop. He rushed down the slope and collided with the railway fence at the bottom. A train was approaching, snorting and belching out sparks; at first he didn’t realize what it was and he was terrified. Then he remembered. Ah, yes, he thought, all those people, the never-ending stream; and here was he, alone, in torment! He got to his feet and started running again, up a hill and down the other side. Whichever way he went, he found himself back at the railway line, sometimes deep in a cutting that opened up before him like a bottomless chasm, sometimes high on an embankment that shut out the horizon like an enormous barricade. The deserted countryside with its endless succession of hills was like a maze with no way out; he was lost in a dreary wasteland of barren fields, from which his distracted mind could find no escape. He had been walking for what seemed like ages over one hill after another when he noticed in front of him a round opening: the black mouth of the tunnel. A train was disappearing into it with a great roaring and hissing of steam, making the ground shake behind it as it vanished into the bowels of the earth.
His legs would carry him no further. He collapsed beside the railway line and wept convulsively, sprawled on his stomach, his face buried in the grass. He could not believe it. The terrible affliction, which he had thought was cured, had returned. He had wanted to kill her. He had wanted to kill this girl. Kill a woman! Kill a woman! The words had sounded in his ears since his early adolescence with the maddening, feverish insistence of unsated desire. Whereas other boys coming to puberty dreamed of possessing a woman, the only thing that had excited him was the thought of killing one. It was pointless trying to deceive himself. As soon as he had seen her naked, he had taken the scissors to plant them into her flesh, into the warm, white flesh of her breast, not simply because she had resisted him, but because he had wanted to do it. Indeed, he had wanted to do it so badly that, had he not clung with both hands to the tufts of grass beneath him, he might even then have run back and slit her throat. Good God! To think that it was Flore! The little girl he had watched growing up! That wild, unruly little girl! To think it was only now that he had discovered how much she loved him! He clenched his fists and dug his fingers into the earth, sobbing uncontrollably, choking with despair.
Eventually he managed to calm himself. If only he could under
stand why this should be. What was so different about him, compared with others? Even when he was a boy, in Plassans, he had often asked himself the same question. His mother, Gervaise, it is true, had had him when she was very young, at fifteen and a half. What is more, he was her second child; she was barely fourteen years old when she had given birth to her first, Claude. But neither of his two brothers, Claude or Étienne, who had been born later, seemed to suffer any ill effects from having a mother who was so young and a father who, like her, was little more than a child too, the handsome young Lantier, the ne’er-do-well who was to cause Gervaise so much unhappiness. Perhaps his brothers had had problems they weren’t prepared to admit to, the elder especially, who wore himself out trying to become a painter. It had become an obsession with him; people said he was besotted with his own genius. It couldn’t really be called a normal family. So many of them had some flaw, and he often thought he must have inherited this family flaw himself.10 Not that his health was poor; it was the anxiety and the shame he felt about his attacks that had made him lose weight when he was younger. But there were times when his mind seemed to be suddenly tipped off balance, when he felt as if there were breaches or holes in him, through which his identity evaporated, and he was surrounded by a thick fog that prevented him from seeing things clearly. At such times his body took on a life of its own; he became the slave of the beast within. And yet he did not drink, not even a tiny sip of brandy, knowing full well that the least drop of alcohol sent him crazy. He had become convinced that he was paying the penalty for all the drinkers who had gone before him, fathers and grandfathers, whole generations of drunkards, whose tainted blood he had inherited. It was a poison slowly eating away inside him, unleashing savage instincts, like a wolf lurking in the depths of the forest waiting to kill.
Such were the thoughts that ran through his mind. He raised himself on to one elbow and gazed into the dark mouth of the tunnel. A new wave of sobbing shook his frame, and he sank down again, rolling his head from side to side on the ground and crying out in anguish. That little girl! He had wanted to kill her! The thought kept returning, sharp and incisive, as if the scissors were piercing his own flesh. He could find no solace to dispel his tormented fears; he had wanted to kill her, and would kill her still if she were there now with her blouse ripped open and her breasts laid bare. He recalled the first time this malady had struck. He was barely sixteen. He was out playing with a girl, the daughter of one of his relatives, two years younger than him. She had fallen down, showing her legs, and he had tried to molest her. The following year, he remembered, he had sharpened a knife so as to stab another girl in the neck, a fair-haired girl who used to walk past his house every morning. She had a pink, fleshy neck, with a little brown birth-mark underneath one ear; he had decided that that was where the knife would go in. There had been others, many others, a nightmare succession of women who, by the mere fact of being near him, had made him suddenly want to kill them — women he had brushed past in the street, women he simply happened to find himself next to. He remembered once sitting beside a young newly wed at the theatre. She had a very loud laugh, and he had had to rush out in the middle of the performance to prevent himself from attacking her. None of these women were known to him personally, so what could he possibly have against them? Each time it happened it came as a flash of blind rage, an insatiable desire to exact revenge for offences done to him in the distant past, offences which no longer found room in his conscious memory. Could it really come from so far back, from the accumulated ill that women had inflicted upon the entire race of men? Was this the swollen legacy of a grudge that had passed from man to man since the first infidelity in the dark recesses of some primeval cave?11 When the frenzy came upon him, his one desire was to attack, to conquer and to dominate a woman. It was a perverse wish to sling her over his back, dead, as if she were his own personal trophy, his alone and his for ever. He felt that his head would burst. He had no answer to all these questions. He knew nothing. His brain was numb. There seemed no way out for him. He was a man driven to acts beyond his control, and whose cause was beyond his understanding.
Another train came past, its headlamps ablaze, and plunged into the tunnel; from within its dark interior came a rumble like thunder that echoed and re-echoed before finally dying away. Almost as if he feared that this anonymous crowd rushing past absorbed in their own affairs might have heard him, Jacques sat up, choked back his tears and tried to look as if nothing had happened. How often in the past, after one of his fits, had the slightest sound made him start, guiltily, like someone caught in the act! The only times he felt relaxed, happy and at ease with the world were when he was driving his locomotive. When he was being hurtled along at full speed, with his ears ringing from the din of the wheels, with his hand on the regulator and his eyes fixed on the line ahead watching out for signals, his mind was at rest, and he filled his lungs with the fresh, clean air that whistled past him. This was why he loved his locomotive as he did; it was like a mistress, soothing him and bringing him only happiness. When he left the Technical College, he had chosen to be an engine driver, despite being highly intelligent, because it allowed him to be on his own, and it took his mind off other things; this was his one ambition. He had become a top-link driver within four years, which earned him 2,800 francs. He also received bonuses for firing and greasing the locomotive, which brought his earnings to over 4,000 francs. He had no wish to earn more. Most of his fellow drivers, in the class two and class three grades,12 fitters taken on as apprentices and trained by the company, married an ordinary sort of woman doing a menial job somewhere behind the scenes, the sort of woman you might see occasionally when, for instance, she came to deliver a passenger’s lunch basket just before a train was due to leave. The more ambitious of his colleagues, especially those who had been to college, preferred to wait until they had become shed foremen before getting married, in the hope that they might be able to find someone a bit better, a woman with class! But Jacques kept away from women altogether. He wasn’t interested in them. He knew he could never marry. The only future for him lay in driving his locomotive, alone, for mile upon mile, endlessly. Small wonder that his superiors held him up as an example to all the others; he didn’t drink and he didn’t chase women. In fact his excesses of good conduct had become something of a joke amongst his more boisterous companions. The only thing they found a little disturbing was when he was in one of his gloomy moods, not speaking, walking round with a vacant expression on his face and looking washed out. He rented a little room in the Rue Cardinet which looked out on to the Batignolles engine shed, where his locomotive was stationed. Every minute of his free time, hour after hour, he remembered, he had spent in this room, like a monk immured in his cell, lying on his stomach, attempting to drown his wayward desires in sleep!
Jacques tried to drag himself to his feet. What was he doing sitting outside on the grass on a cold misty night in the middle of winter? The countryside lay in darkness. The only light came from the sky. A fine mist was spread across it like a vast dome of frosted glass, suffused by a pale yellow glow from the moon which lay hidden from view behind it. The black horizon lay stretched out as silent and still as a corpse. It must be nearly nine o’clock, he thought to himself. The best thing to do would be to go back to the house and get some sleep. As if in a daze, he saw himself opening the door, climbing the stairs to the attic and lying down on the straw next to Flore’s bedroom with only a wooden dividing wall between them. She would be there. He would hear her breathing. He even knew that she always slept with the door open and that nothing could prevent him from walking into her room. Once more he began to shake violently. He saw her lying there undressed, her body spread out, warm from sleep, defenceless. Weeping uncontrollably, he fell back to the ground. He had wanted to kill her! He had wanted to kill her! He was gasping for breath. He shuddered at the thought that within minutes from now, if he went back to the house, he would go and kill her in her bed. Not having a weapon wouldn’t pre
vent him. Try as he might to bury his head in his hands and make it all go away, he knew that the male within him, no matter how hard he resisted, would push open the door and strangle her in her bed, goaded by its born instinct to rape, by its overwhelming need to avenge the wrong inflicted on it since the world began. No, he must not go back to the house. He must stay out there tramping the fields! He leaped to his feet and began to run.
For half an hour he chased frantically through the darkened countryside, fleeing before the horrors in his mind, like the quarry pursued by a snarling pack of hounds. He ran up hills and down steep-sided ravines, never stopping. He waded two streams which crossed his path, waist-deep in water. His way was barred by a clump of trees. How would he get through? His one thought was to keep moving forward in a straight line, on and on, to escape from himself, to escape from the beast, from the creature that dwelled within him. But to no avail; the creature ran as fast as he did; he carried it with him wherever he went. For the last seven months he had thought he had got rid of it; things had begun to return to normal. But now it was about to start again; his life would once more become a constant battle with himself, lest the beast should leap out at the first woman who happened to come near him. Fortunately, the vast stillness of the countryside, the great emptiness that surrounded him brought some solace to his troubled thoughts; he found himself imagining a life as silent and empty as this desolate landscape, through which he might walk for ever, without meeting a soul. He must have come round in a big circle without realizing it, scrambling about in the dense undergrowth above the tunnel; he now found himself back beside the railway line, on the other side of the track. He stepped back, frightened that someone might walk by and see him. He took a path that led round a small hill, but lost his way. Eventually he found himself back beside the railway fence at the entrance to the tunnel, directly opposite the field in which he had lain sobbing not long before. He could go no further and remained there, unable to move. Suddenly, from within the bowels of the earth, he heard the rumble of an approaching train, faintly at first but getting louder and louder every second. It was the express for Le Havre. It had left Paris at six thirty and it passed here at nine twenty-five. It was the train that Jacques himself drove every other day.