The Beast Within (16 page)

Eventually he managed to calm himself. If only he could understand 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.
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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?
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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,
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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 prevent 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.

He saw the black mouth of the tunnel light up, like the open door of a blazing furnace. The train shot out of the tunnel with a deafening roar, the dazzling beam from the big round eye of the headlamp cutting through the landscape and lighting up the rails ahead like twin strips of flame. The locomotive came and went like a flash of lightning, followed by a long string of carriages, a procession of little square windows, brightly lit, and compartments full of passengers, all rushing past at such speed that it was impossible to be sure afterwards what the eye had actually seen. Even so, for one split-second through the brilliantly lit windows of a reserved compartment, Jacques distinctly saw a man holding another man down on the carriage seat and thrusting a knife into his throat. There was also another dark shape, possibly a third person, possibly some bags that had fallen off the luggage rack, pinning the struggling victim down by his legs. The train shot past him and was already disappearing in the direction of La Croix-de-Maufras. All that could be seen in the darkness was the red triangle formed by its three tail lamps.

Jacques remained fixed to the spot, gazing at the train as the noise faded into the dead stillness of the countryside. Had his eyes deceived him? Now the train had gone, he couldn’t be sure. The image had come and gone in a flash; he couldn’t believe he had really seen it. He couldn’t recall a single detail of the appearance of the two people involved in the scene. The dark shape was probably a travelling rug that had fallen over the victim’s body, but at first what he thought he had seen was a face, a delicate face with a fair complexion and long, thick hair. It was all so confused and fleeting, like something seen in a dream. For a brief moment the face came back to him; then it vanished completely. He must have imagined it. The whole thing left him feeling numb; it seemed so incredible. He concluded that his mind must be playing tricks on him after the awful shock he had just had.

Jacques walked on aimlessly for nearly another hour, trying to make sense of the confused thoughts that turned in his mind. Although he was exhausted, he was beginning to feel more composed; he felt very cold inside, and his panic had left him. Without intending to, he ended up walking back towards La Croix-de-Maufras. He found himself outside the gate-keeper’s cottage, but decided that, rather than go inside, he would sleep in the little lean-to shed, built on to one of the end walls. Then he noticed a slit of light under the door. Without thinking, he pushed it open. As he stood in the doorway a strange sight greeted his eyes.

Misard was in the corner of the room. He had moved the butter pot to one side and he was on all fours, with a lighted lamp beside him on the floor. He was tapping the wall with his knuckles, looking for something. The sound of the door opening made him sit up, but otherwise he didn’t appear in the least concerned.

‘I was looking for some matches,’ he said simply. ‘I dropped them here somewhere.’

He put the butter pot back in its place.

‘I came to get my lamp,’ he added, ‘because I saw someone lying on the track when I was coming back just now. I think he must be dead.’