Monomaniac (La bête humaine) — Section 4

"He, indeed!"

she replied.

"No, no; he is my friend.

I have no sweetheart, and I don't want one."

She raised her powerful head, with its thick yellow mane curling very low on the forehead, and from all her massive, supple body, burst a savage energy of will.

Already a legend was growing up about her in the neighbourhood.

Stories were related of heroic deeds of salvage: a cart torn with a mighty jerk from before a train; a railway carriage stopped while descending the declivity at Barentin alone, like some furious beast bounding along to encounter an express.

Then there was the tale of her adventure with a pointsman at the Dieppe embranchment, at the other end of the tunnel, a certain Ozil, a man about thirty, whom she seemed to have encouraged for a short time, but who having been so ill-advised as to attempt to take a liberty, had almost met his death from a blow she dealt him with a club.

Virgin and warlike, she disdained the male, which finally convinced people that she certainly had something wrong with her head.

Jacques, hearing her declare that she did not want a sweetheart, continued his fun: "Then your marriage with Ozil can't be in a good way?

Yet I've heard it said that you run to meet him every day through the tunnel."

She shrugged her shoulders.

"Ah!

To Jericho, my marriage!"

she retorted.

"What you say about the tunnel makes me laugh.

Two miles to gallop over in the darkness, with the thought that you may get cut in two by a train if you don't keep your eyes open.

You should hear them snorting in there!

But Ozil worried me.

He's not the one I want."

"Then you want someone else?"

"Ah!

I don't know.

Ah!

faith, no!"

She had burst into a laugh again, while a slight embarrassment made her give her attention to a knot in the cords which she could not manage to undo.

Then, without raising her head, as if very much absorbed by her occupation, she said: "And you, have you no sweetheart?"

Jacques, in his turn, became serious.

He avoided looking at her, his eyes moved restlessly from side to side, and were at last fixed on space in the night.

Abruptly he answered: "No." "Just so," she continued; "they told me you held women in abomination.

And, besides, I've known you for a very long time, and you have never said anything nice.

Why?

Tell me."

As he gave no answer, she made up her mind to leave the knot, and look at him.

"Do you only love your engine?"

she inquired.

"People joke about it, you know.

They pretend you are always polishing, and making it shine, as though you had caresses for nothing else.

If I tell you this, it is because I am your friend."

He looked at her, now, in the pale light of the fumy sky.

And he remembered her when she was a child.

Even then, she was violent and self-willed, but she sprang to his neck, as soon as he entered the house, with all the passionate impulse of a madcap.

Later on, having frequently lost sight of her, he had found her grown taller each time he saw her.

She continued to put her arms round his neck, troubling him, more and more, by the flame of her great light eyes.

She was now a superb woman, and no doubt she had loved him a long time--from childhood.

His heart began to beat.

A sudden sensation told him that he was the one she awaited.

He felt a swimming in the head, his first impulse, in the anguish he experienced, was to flee.

Love had always made him mad, and he felt bent on murder.

"What are you doing there, on your feet?"

she resumed.

"Why don't you sit down?"

Again he hesitated.

Then, his legs suddenly becoming very tired, and himself vanquished by the desire to try love once more, he sank down beside her on the heap of cords.

But he said nothing; his throat was quite dry.

It was she, now, the proud, the silent one, who chattered merrily until she lost breath, deafening herself with her own verbosity.

"You see, the mistake mamma made was to marry Misard," she began.

"He'll play her a nasty trick.

I don't care a fig, because one has quite enough to do with one's own business.

Don't you think so?

And, besides, mamma sends me off to bed as soon as I want to cut in.

So she must do the best she can by herself!

I pass my time outside the house, I do.

I am thinking of things for later on.

Ah!

you know, I saw you go by this morning, on your engine.

Look!

over there, from those bushes, where I was seated.

But you, you never look--I'll tell you the things I'm thinking of, but not now, later, when we have quite become good friends."

She had let the scissors slip away from her, and he, still silent, had caught hold of her two hands.

Delighted, she abandoned them to him.

But when he carried them to his burning lips, she gave an affrighted start.

The warrior woman awoke, prepared, and warlike.

"No, no!

Leave me alone!"

she exclaimed.

"I won't have it.

Keep quiet.

Let's talk."

Without heeding her, without hearing what she said, he grasped her brutally in his arms, crushing her lips beneath his own.

She uttered a feeble cry, which was more like a moan, so deep, so sweet, that it revealed the tenderness she had so long concealed.

Then, as he, breathless, ceased his kisses and looked at her, he was all at once seized with frenzy, with such frightful ferocity, that he glanced round about him in search of a weapon, a stone, something, in fact, to kill her with.

His eyes fell upon the scissors, shining among the bits of cord.

At a bound, he secured them, and he would have buried them in her bosom had not an icy chill brought him suddenly to his senses.

Casting the scissors from him, he fled, distracted, while she imagined he had left her because she had resisted his caress.

Jacques fled in the melancholy night.

He ascended at full speed a path on the hillside, which brought him down to a little dale.

The stones he scattered beneath his feet, alarmed him, and he tore off to the left among the bushes, there he bent round to the right, and came to a bare plateau.

Abruptly descending from the high ground, he fell into the hedge bordering the line; a train flew along, roaring and flaming.

At first he failed to understand what it could be, and felt terrified.

Ah!

yes, all this multitude that was passing, the continual flood, while he stood there in anguish!

He started off once more, climbing the hill and descending again.

He now constantly encountered the railway line, either at the bottom of deep cuttings, resembling unfathomable depths, or else on embankments that shut out the horizon with gigantic barricades.

This desert country, broken up into hillocks, was like a labyrinth without issue, where he, in his folly, wheeled round and round in the mournful desolation of the fallow land.

And he had been beating up and down the inclines a long time, when before him he perceived the round opening, the black jaw of the tunnel.

An up-train plunged into it, howling and whistling, leaving behind, when it had disappeared, absorbed by the earth, a prolonged concussion that made the ground quake.

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, 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 torn 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 thunderbolt 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 depôts 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 depôt 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 gatekeeper, 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.

"A man on the line!"

he exclaimed, turning pale.

"Where?"

Misard was about to relate that he was returning with a couple of eels which he had taken from his ground lines, and that he had first of all run home, as fast as he could, to hide them.

But he reflected that there was no necessity to confide in this young man, and with a vague gesture he replied: "Over there, about half a mile away.

It requires a light to find out more."

At this moment Jacques heard a thud overhead.

He was so nervous that he started.

"It's nothing," said Misard.

"It's only Flore moving."

And, in fact, the young man recognised the pit-pat of two naked feet on the floor.

She had come to listen at the half-open door.

"I'll go with you," Jacques resumed.

"Are you sure he's dead?"

"Well, he looked like it," answered the other.

"We shall soon see with the lantern."

"What's your opinion?"

inquired Jacques.

"An accident?"

"Maybe," replied Misard.

"Some chap who's got cut in two, or perhaps a passenger who jumped out of a carriage."

Jacques shuddered.

"Come along quick, quick!"

he exclaimed.

Never had he been agitated with such a fever to see and know.

Outside the house, while his companion, without any concern, walked along the line swinging his lantern, he ran on ahead, irritated at the delay.

It was like a physical desire, the fire within that precipitates the steps of lovers at the hour of meeting.

He feared what awaited him yonder, and yet he flew there with all the muscles of his limbs.

When he reached the spot, when he almost stumbled over a dark heap lying near the down-line, he remained planted where he stood with a shiver running from his heels to the nape of his neck.

And, his anguish at being unable to see distinctly, turned to oaths against the other, who was loitering along, thirty paces behind.

"Come on, come on!"

he shouted.

"If he's still alive, we may be able to do something for him."

Misard waddled forward in his sluggish way.

Then, when he had swung the lantern to and fro, over the body, he muttered: "Ah!

the devil take me!

It's all up with him."

The man, no doubt tumbling out of a carriage, had fallen with his face downwards, a couple of feet at the most from the metals.

Nothing could be seen of his head but a crown of thick black hair.

His legs were apart.

His right arm lay as if dislocated, while his left was bent under his chest.

He was very well attired in a big, blue cloth overcoat, neat boots, and fine linen.

The body bore no trace of having been crushed, but a quantity of blood had run from the throat, and soiled the shirt collar.

"Some gentleman whom they've done for," tranquilly resumed Misard, after a few seconds' silent inspection.

Then, turning towards Jacques, who stood motionless and thunderstruck, he continued: "He must not be touched.

It's forbidden.

You will have to remain here, and watch over him, while I go to Barentin to tell the station-master about it."

He raised his lantern, and looked at a mile-post.

"Good!"

said he.

"Just at post 153." And, placing his lantern on the ground beside the corpse, he took himself off at his usual loitering gait.

Jacques, left by himself, did not move, but continued gazing at this inert mass that had fallen there, and which the uncertain light, just above the ground, only revealed indistinctly.

The agitation that had made him rush forward, the horrible attraction that held him there, ended in this keen thought which burst from all his being: the other one, the man he had caught sight of with the knife in his hand had dared!

He had gratified his desire!

He had killed.

Ah!

what would he give not to be a coward, to be able to satisfy himself at last, to plunge in the knife!

He, who had been tortured by this thirst for ten years!

In his fever, he felt contempt for himself, and admiration for the other; and, above all, he felt the necessity to gaze on the victim, the quenchless thirst to feast his eyes on this human remnant, this broken dancing-Jack, this limp rag, which the stab of a knife had made of a creature.

What he dreamed of, the other had realised, and it was that.

If he killed, he would have that on the ground.

His heart beat fit to break.

His prurience for murder became violent as concupiscence, at the sight of this tragic corpse.

He took a step, approached nearer, after the manner of a child making himself familiar with an object he fears.

Yes, he would dare, he would dare in his turn!

But a roar behind his back, made him spring aside.

A train arrived which he had not heard, being so taken up with the contemplation of the body.

He would have been crushed to pieces had not the warm steam and the formidable puffing of the engine warned him in time.

The train flew past in its hurricane of noise, smoke, and flame.

This one also carried a great many people.

The flood of travellers continued streaming towards Havre, for the fête on the morrow.

A child was flattening his nose against a window, looking out at the black country; profiles of men appeared, while a young woman, lowering one of the glasses, threw out a paper stained with butter and sugar.

Already the joyous train was flying away in the distance, listless of the corpse its wheels had almost grazed.

And the body continued lying there on its face, indistinctly lit up by the lantern, amidst the melancholy peacefulness of night.

Then Jacques had a desire to see the wound, while he was alone.

But he hesitated, in the anxiety that if he touched the head, it would, perhaps, be noticed.

He reckoned that Misard could not be back with the station-master before three-quarters of an hour; and as the minutes passed, he thought of this Misard, of this puny fellow, so slow, so calm, who also dared, who was killing as tranquilly as possible, with doses of poison.

Then it was easy enough to kill?

Everybody killed.

He drew nearer the corpse, and the idea of looking at the wound stung him so sharply that he was burning all over.

He wanted to see how it had been done, and what had run from it, to see the red hole!