The assistant traffic controller raised his lamp to tell the driver he could ask for the road. There were two blasts on the whistle. The red light in front of the signalman’s cabin changed to white. The guard stood by the door of the luggage-van waiting for the all clear. He then signalled to the driver, who gave one long blast on the whistle and opened the regulator. The train began to move; it was on its way, very slowly at first but gradually gathering speed. It ran under the Pont de l’Europe and plunged into the Batignolles tunnel. All that could be seen was the red triangle, formed by the three tail lamps, like drops of blood from an open wound, still visible as the train disappeared into the chill blackness of the night. Nothing could now stop it. It sped on its way and was gone.
II
The house at La Croix-de-Maufras
1
stands in a large garden, which is cut in two by the railway line. It is set at an angle and so close to the track that it shakes whenever a train goes by.
Once seen, it stays imprinted on the memory for ever. Everyone notices it as the train speeds past, but no one knows its history — why it remains locked up, why it stands abandoned, like a ship in distress, its grey shutters closed and slowly turning green from the gales that blow in from the west. It is a desolate place, and the house seems to add to its desolation, standing on its own, cut off from all human habitation.
The only other dwelling near by is the level-crossing keeper’s cottage, standing where the road turns a bend and crosses the railway on its way to Doinville five kilometres away. It is a single-storey building, its walls full of cracks, its roof tiles eaten away by moss, and crouching like a destitute beggar in the garden that surrounds it. The garden, used for growing vegetables, is enclosed by a thick hedge and contains a large well, as tall as the house itself. The level-crossing is situated half-way between the two stations of Malaunay and Barentin, exactly four kilometres from each of them. It is very rarely used; the gate is old and falling apart and is only ever opened for wagons coming down from the quarries at Bécourt, half a league away in the forest. One cannot imagine a place more remote, more cut off from civilization. It is separated from Malaunay by a long tunnel, and the only way to Barentin is along an overgrown footpath that follows the railway line. Visitors are few and far between.
On this particular evening, sultry and overcast, a traveller, who had just got off a train from Le Havre at Barentin, was striding along the path to La Croix-de-Maufras as night was beginning to fall. The countryside at this point is a succession of hills and valleys, like waves at sea. The railway crosses them by a series of cuttings and embankments, but on either side of the line, the continual rise and fall of the terrain makes travelling by road extremely difficult; as a result this terribly lonely place feels even lonelier still. The colourless fields stand bare and neglected; the hilltops are covered with clumps of trees, and streams overhung with willow run down the narrow valleys. Outcrops of bare chalk lie strewn across the landscape, and the hills stretch away into the distance, sterile, and as silent and empty as the grave.
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The traveller, a strong, athletic-looking young man, quickened his step as though he wanted to escape the gloomy approach of night in so desolate a place.
In the gate-keeper’s garden a girl stood drawing water at the well. She was eighteen years old, tall, fair-haired and strongly built; she had a large mouth, big green eyes, a low forehead and a thick head of hair. She was not a pretty girl; she had strong, broad hips and the muscular arms of a man. As soon as she spotted the traveller walking along the path, she put down her bucket and ran over to the gate in the hedge.
‘Why, it’s Jacques!’ she cried.
He looked up. He was just twenty-six. Like her, he was tall; a dark, handsome young man with a round face and regular features, but with a rather pronounced jaw. He had thick, curly hair and a big, curly moustache, so black that by contrast his face seemed quite pale. He might have been taken for a gentleman, looking at his delicate complexion and his carefully shaven cheeks. His hands, however, bore the tell-tale signs of his job — small, delicate hands, but stained yellow with grease, which came from driving a locomotive.
‘Hello, Flore,’ he said simply.
Suddenly, the lustre had gone from his big dark eyes. A red mist swam before them; they had become pale and strangely disturbed. His eyelids flickered. He looked away. He had suddenly become embarrassed and ill at ease. His whole body had instinctively recoiled from her.
She stood in front of him without moving, looking straight at him. She had noticed before how he tried to hide the sudden, involuntary shudder that ran through him whenever he came close to a woman. She found it very strange, and it saddened her. Jacques asked her if his mother was indoors, although he knew perfectly well that she was ill and unable to leave the house. In an attempt to cover her embarrassment, she simply nodded and stepped aside, so that he could enter without touching her. She returned to the well, not deigning to speak, her head held high in a show of unconcern.
Jacques walked quickly across the little garden and went into the house. The first room he entered was the large kitchen, where the family lived and had their meals. In the middle of the room, Aunt Phasie,
3
as he had called her since he was a child, sat on her own by the table on a wicker chair with an old shawl wrapped round her legs. She was a cousin of his father, a Lantier.
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She had stood as godmother to him, and when he was six she had taken him in to live with her, his mother and father having disappeared and run off to Paris. Jacques remained at Plassans and later attended classes at the local Technical College. He had always been especially grateful to Aunt Phasie. If he had managed to get on in life, he said, it was entirely thanks to her. He had spent two years with the Paris-Orléans company,
5
before becoming a top-link driver for the Western Railway, which was when he discovered that his godmother was remarried, to a level-crossing keeper by the name of Misard, and was now living in the middle of nowhere at La Croix-de-Maufras, along with her two daughters by her first marriage. Although she was barely forty-five, Aunt Phasie, once such a fine-looking woman, tall and strong, now looked sixty. She had grown pitifully thin, there was no colour in her face and she shook continuously.
She was overjoyed to see him.
‘Jacques,’ she cried. ‘My own, dear Jacques! What a lovely surprise!’
He kissed her on both cheeks and told her that he had just been given two days’ unexpected holiday; the engine that he drove,
La Lison,
6
had broken a coupling-rod as the train was coming into Le Havre that morning. It was going to take at least twenty-four hours to repair, and he wouldn’t be able to start work again until the following evening, when he was due to drive the 6.40 express. He had thought it would be nice to come and see her. He was able to stay the night, as the train back didn’t leave Barentin until seven twenty-six the next morning. He held her poor, shrunken hands in his and told her how worried he had been by her last letter.
‘Yes, dear,’ she said. ‘I’m not well. I’m not well at all. How good of you to realize I wanted to see you! I know how busy you must be and I didn’t dare ask you to come. But here you are! I’m frightened, Jacques. I’m really frightened.’
She paused and looked anxiously out of the window. In the fading light they could see her husband, Misard, standing inside a section box
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on the other side of the railway track, one of those little wooden cabins situated every four or five kilometres along the line and connected by telegraph to make sure it is safe to receive the next train. When his wife, and later Flore, had been given the job of looking after the level-crossing, he had been appointed as section operator.
She shuddered and lowered her voice, as if she thought he might hear her.
‘Jacques,’ she whispered, ‘he’s trying to poison me!’
Jacques started in surprise. He turned towards the window. As he did so, the lustre once again went from his eyes; once again they became misty, pale and strangely disturbed.
‘Oh, Aunt Phasie, how can you think that?’ he murmured. ‘He looks so frail and harmless.’
A train for Le Havre had just gone by, and Misard had emerged from his cabin to close the section behind it. Jacques watched him as he pulled back the lever and set the signal at red. He was a puny little man, with very little hair and a small straggly beard that was going grey; his face looked pinched and starved. He spoke very little, kept himself to himself, never lost his temper and was obsequiously polite to his superiors. He had gone back into his cabin to record the time of the train in his time-keeping book and to push the two buttons on the transmitter, one to pass the train on to the next section along the line and the other to open the line to the section which the train had just left.
‘You don’t know him,’ Aunt Phasie continued. ‘He’s putting something horrible in my food; I swear he is. I used to know how to stand up for myself. At one time, I could have made mincemeat of him, and now it’s him, that weakling, that scrap of nothing, that’s making mincemeat of me!’
She poured out all her fears and hidden resentment, delighted at last to have someone she could confide in. Whatever had possessed her to get married again to a pathetic creature like him, with not a penny to his name and stingy as they come, and she five years older, with two daughters already, one six years old and one eight? It was ten years now since she had tied the knot, and not a minute had gone by when she didn’t regret it. Her life was a misery, stuck up there in the north, where it was perpetually cold, miles from anywhere, chilled to the bone, bored stiff, with no one to talk to, and not a neighbour within walking distance.
Misard had been a plate-layer when she first met him, but now all he earned was a meagre twelve hundred francs as a section operator. She used to be paid fifty francs for looking after the level-crossing when she first got the job, but Flore had taken that over now. That was how it was and that was how it was going to remain. It was hopeless. All she knew for certain was that she was going to spend the rest of her days and die in this God-forsaken hole, with not a living soul to comfort her. What she didn’t tell him about were the good times she had had, the occasions, before she became ill, when her husband was away working as a plate-layer and she had stayed at home on her own with her daughters, to look after the level-crossing. In those days her good looks were known to everyone who worked on the railway from Rouen to Le Havre, and all the permanent way inspectors made a point of calling at the level-crossing to see her. She even had men competing for her attention — two foremen plate-layers from different gangs who kept coming back to inspect the crossing, to make sure that everything was in proper working order. Her husband didn’t seem to bother; he was always very pleasant to anyone who called, made himself scarce and came and went without noticing a thing. But these excitements were a thing of the past. All she did now was sit on her own for weeks and months on end, feeling herself getting weaker and weaker by the hour.
‘He’s after me,’ she said. ‘And he’ll finish me off, even if he is only a midget.’
Suddenly a bell rang. She looked through the window with the same anxious look as before. It was the next section box down the line sending on a train for Paris; the needle on the section indicator in front of the window showed the direction in which it was travelling. Misard stopped the bell, came out of his cabin and gave two blasts on his horn to warn of the approaching train. Thereupon, Flore walked over to the gate, closed it and assumed her position, raising the flag in its leather holster high in the air. The train, an express, was hidden from view by a bend in the line, but it could be heard getting louder and louder as it came rumbling towards them. It went past like a clap of thunder, making the house shake, almost blowing it away in a mighty rush of wind. As soon as it had gone, Flore went back to her vegetables. Misard closed the up line after the train, and walked over to open the down line again, by changing the signal from red. A further ring on the bell and the movement of the other needle on his section indicator told him that the train which had gone by five minutes earlier had now cleared the next section. He returned to his cabin, telegraphed the two other section boxes, noted down the time of the train and waited. It was the same routine day in day out, all day long, never moving from his cabin, eating his meals there, not even bothering to read a newspaper, and apparently with never so much as a thought passing through his empty head.
Jacques, who used to pull his godmother’s leg about the many inspectors whose hearts she had broken, couldn’t help smiling.
‘Perhaps he’s jealous,’ he said.
Phasie shrugged her shoulders as if she felt sorry for him, but she couldn’t prevent a mischievous little twinkle suddenly appearing in her poor, lifeless eyes.
‘Him, jealous!’ she said. ‘He doesn’t know the meaning of the word! So long as he wasn’t out of pocket, he couldn’t care a fig what I got up to.’
Again she started to shake.
‘That side of things never bothered him,’ she said. ‘All he cares about is money. What’s really upset him is that I won’t give him the thousand francs that Father left me last year. It’s brought bad luck, just like he said it would. It’s made me ill. I’ve been ill ever since. Ever since then.’
Jacques sensed what she was trying to tell him, but assumed it was her illness that made her entertain such dark thoughts. He attempted to reassure her. But she kept shaking her head and would not be persuaded otherwise. Eventually Jacques said, ‘Look, there’s a simple answer. If you want him to stop bothering you, give him the money.’