The Beast Within (48 page)

Her lips parted, and, as if speaking her thoughts aloud, she said in a barely audible whisper, ‘He came back from the station earlier on. I had no idea why. Then I saw him take his revolver. He’d forgotten it. He’ll be going to look for prowlers, I know he will.’

They walked a little further. After a while, Jacques broke the silence.

‘Some intruders got in here last night and stole some lead. He’ll be coming to check. I know he will.’

A shiver ran down her spine. Neither of them spoke. They walked on slowly. She began to wonder, was it really the knife she had felt in his pocket? She kissed him twice, pressing herself against him to see if she could feel the knife again, but she could not be certain. She kissed him a third time and placed her hand on his pocket. Yes, it was the knife. Jacques understood and drew her towards him, burying her head in his chest and whispering in her ear, ‘We’ll wait for him to come. You will be free.’

The murder had been decided. They walked on, but their feet no longer seemed to touch the ground; it was as if they were being borne along by some force beyond themselves. Their senses had suddenly become more acute, their sense of touch especially. It hurt them to hold hands. The least touch of their lips felt like the sharp scratch of a fingernail. Their ears were filled with sounds which earlier they had hardly heard — the distant hissing and clanking of locomotives, bumps and bangs, and footsteps walking past in the dark. They could see things in the night, black shapes, as if a cloud had been lifted from their eyes. A bat flew past, and they were able to follow it as it turned and darted in the sky. They stopped beside one of the coal stacks, motionless, straining their eyes and ears, every muscle of their bodies tense and alert. They spoke in whispers.

‘Did you hear that?’ she said. ‘It was a cry for help.’

‘No,’ he said, ‘it’s a carriage being shunted.’

‘On our left! There’s someone there. I can hear footsteps.’

‘No, it’s the rats in the coal.’

The minutes went by. Suddenly she squeezed his arm.

‘It’s him!’ she whispered.

‘Where? I can’t see.’

‘He’s just walked round the goods shed. He’s coming towards us. Look! That’s his shadow on the wall.’

‘Are you sure it’s him? Is he on his own?’

‘Yes, he’s on his own.’

The moment had come. She threw herself into his arms and pressed her burning lips to his in a long, passionate kiss. She wanted to give herself to him with all her heart. How she loved him! How she detested Roubaud! If she had dared, she would have killed him twenty times and saved him the horror of it. But she couldn’t bring herself to do it. She didn’t have the strength. It needed the firm hand of a man. And now, in this one enduring kiss, she wished to breathe her resolution into him and to promise him that she was his, totally, to have as his own, body and soul. A train whistled in the distance, sending its mournful cry across the night. From somewhere far away came the regular, insistent thud of a giant steam-hammer. The fog from the sea drifted across the sky like an army in disarray. Tattered wisps of cloud obscured the lights from the station. When at last she removed her lips from his, she no longer belonged to herself; she felt she had given herself entirely to him.

He took out the knife and snapped it open. No sooner had he done so than he swore under his breath.

‘Damn it!’ he said. ‘He’s gone the other way. We can’t do it.’

The shadow on the wall had come within fifty paces of them, had turned to the left and was now walking away with the steady, unhurried gait of the night watchman quietly doing his rounds.

Séverine gave Jacques a push.

‘Go on!’ she said.

The two of them moved forward, Jacques in front and Séverine behind him. They followed their prey, taking care to make no noise. At one point, as Roubaud went round the corner of the repair shops, they lost sight of him. They cut across a siding and spotted him again, twenty paces in front of them. They hid against every wall they came to, so that he wouldn’t see them. One false step would have given them away.

‘We’re not going to catch him,’ Jacques muttered. ‘If he gets to the signal box, we’ve lost him.’

Séverine kept whispering encouragement.

‘Come on!’ she said. ‘Come on!’

Although he was out in the dark, in a huge empty railway yard at the dead of night, Jacques’s mind was made up as firmly as if he were quietly lying in wait in a corner of some secluded alleyway. He moved forward quickly but cautiously. His heart was beating fast; he kept telling himself that this murder was perfectly justified, that it was a sensible and legitimate act that had been carefully thought through and properly decided. He was simply exercising a right — the right to live in fact, since Roubaud’s death was a prerequisite for his own survival. All he had to do was stab him with the knife and his happiness was assured.

‘We’re not going to catch him, we’re not going to catch him,’ he repeated furiously, as he saw the shadow move towards the signal box. ‘We’ve had it. He’s going to get away.’

Suddenly, Séverine placed her hand on his arm and held him close. She was trembling.

‘Look!’ she said. ‘He’s coming back!’

Roubaud had turned to the right and was coming towards them. If he had any inkling that there had been somebody behind him waiting to pounce on him, it didn’t seem to affect him; he continued calmly on his way, carefully making sure that all was in order, and in no hurry to leave until his inspection was complete.

Jacques and Séverine remained standing where they were, without moving. As chance would have it, they had stopped near the edge of one of the coal stacks. They leaned against it, pressing their backs to the wall of coal, as if trying to melt into it and lose themselves in its inky blackness. They hardly dared breathe.

Jacques watched Roubaud as he came towards them. He was now no more than thirty metres away, and every step brought him nearer, like the steady, inexorable pendulum of fate. Another twenty steps, another ten steps, and Roubaud would be in front of him; he would raise his arm thus and plant the knife in his neck, twisting it backwards and forwards to silence his screams. The seconds seemed unending; his head was teeming with so many thoughts that he had lost all sense of time. One by one, his reasons for murdering Roubaud passed through his mind yet again. He saw the murder clearly; he understood both its cause and its consequences. Roubaud was now only five steps away. Jacques’s resolve was stretched to breaking point, but he held firm. He had made up his mind to kill and he knew why he was going to do it.

Roubaud was within two steps of him. One step more and ... Suddenly Jacques’s courage abandoned him; his determination collapsed. He couldn’t do it. How could he kill a defenceless man? Reasoning alone could never impel someone to murder; something more was needed — the killer instinct, the will to seize the prey, the hunger, the passion maybe, to tear it limb from limb. Conscience was probably no more than a vague assortment of ideas instilled by the slow workings of a centuries-old tradition of justice. Even so, he knew he didn’t have the right to kill, and no matter how hard he tried to convince himself, he felt that it was not a right he could assume.

Roubaud walked past, quite undisturbed. His elbow brushed against them as they stood pressing themselves to the stack of coal. If either of them had as much as breathed, Roubaud would have spotted them, but they stood there like corpses. Jacques did not raise his arm and he did not plant the knife in Roubaud’s neck. Nothing disturbed the stillness of the night; nothing moved. Roubaud was already ten steps away from them, and they remained motionless, pressed against the coal stack, not daring to breath, terrified of the man who, alone and defenceless, had just calmly walked past them.

Jacques let out a sob of pent-up rage and humiliation.

‘I can’t do it! I can’t do it!’ he cried.

He wanted to take Séverine in his arms, to lean against her, to be forgiven and comforted. But without a word she moved aside. He stretched out his hands towards her, only to feel her skirt slip through his fingers as she silently ran away. He started to run after her but quickly realized that it was pointless. To see her rush off like that was more than he could bear. Was it his weakness that had made her so angry? Did she despise him? He had decided it was better not to follow her, but now that he found himself alone in this vast, deserted railway yard, with the yellow lights of the gas lamps scattered across it like tears, he was seized with despair. He rushed back to his room to bury his head in his pillow and erase all the misery of his life from his mind.

About ten days later, towards the end of March, the Roubauds finally won their battle against the Lebleus. The management approved their request. It had had the full support of Monsieur Dabadie, especially as the missing letter from Lebleu, promising to vacate the apartment should it be required by the new assistant stationmaster, had been discovered by Mademoiselle Guichon while looking through the station’s files for some old bills. Madame Lebleu, in her frustration, made a great song and dance about having to move; the Roubauds were obviously doing their best to ensure her early demise, so she might as well move out straight away and have done with it. For three whole days, while the epoch-making move took place, the corridor was the scene of feverish activity. Even little Madame Moulin, normally so shy and unobtrusive, and hardly ever seen, got herself involved by carrying Séverine’s work-table across to her new apartment. But it was Philomène who was mainly to blame for the ill feeling that was caused. She was there on the first day, bundling things together, moving furniture about, and marching into the apartment at the front even before the tenants had left. It was Philomène who eventually showed Madame Lebleu the door, with the furniture from both apartments still lying jumbled together in the middle of the corridor. Philomène had come to show such an interest in Jacques and everything he did that Pecqueux had begun to grow suspicious. One day when he was in one of his drunken, bullying moods, he had taunted her and asked her if she was sleeping with Jacques, warning her that if he ever caught them together they would both live to regret it. This merely succeeded in increasing her attachment to Jacques all the more. She acted as their self-appointed housemaid, looking after both him and his mistress, in the hope that by serving the two of them she might have something of him for herself. When she had moved out the last chair, the doors were slammed shut. She then noticed that Madame Lebleu had left a stool behind. She opened the door again and flung it across the corridor. And that was that.

Slowly life returned to its old routine. Madame Lebleu sat glued to her armchair by her rheumatism, bored to death, her eyes full of tears because all she could see out of her window was the zinc cladding of the station roof, which shut out the sky. Séverine meanwhile sat at one of the windows at the front, working at her never-ending bed-cover, and looking down at the lively activity of the station forecourt. People and carriages were continually coming and going, the big trees along the pavements were already beginning to turn green with the early spring, and in the distance she could see the wooded slopes of the Ingouville hills, dotted with white summer houses. She was surprised to discover what little pleasure it gave her to finally have her dream come true, to find herself in the apartment she had so jealously coveted, so light and airy and sunny. Madame Simon, her cleaner, was always grumbling and getting annoyed because things weren’t in their usual place, and this made Séverine herself sometimes wish she had never left the ‘grotty little hovel next door’, as she put it, where at least the dirt didn’t show as much. As for Roubaud, he simply let things take their course; he didn’t even seem to notice that he now lived in a different apartment. He often went to the wrong door and only discovered his mistake when his new key wouldn’t fit the lock. He hardly ever came home now, and his general decline continued. He did show brief signs of a recovery when his political sympathies were rekindled. His ideas had always been rather vague and somewhat lukewarm; but he hadn’t forgotten his argument with the Sub-Prefect, which had nearly cost him his job. The government had been badly shaken by the general elections
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and was going through a terrible crisis. Roubaud was cock-a-hoop and went round telling everyone that Napoleon’s lot wouldn’t be in charge for much longer. His revolutionary comments were overheard by Mademoiselle Guichon, who informed Monsieur Dabadie. Monsieur Dabadie gave Roubaud a friendly warning, and this sufficed to calm him down. Now that the squabbles over accommodation had been settled and people on the corridor were being more friendly towards each other, with Madame Lebleu pining away from distress, why stir things up again over the government and its difficulties? Roubaud simply raised his hands, as much as to say that he couldn’t care less about politics, or anything else for that matter. He grew fatter by the day, but it didn’t seem to bother him. He plodded about his business and turned his back on the world.

Jacques and Séverine were now free to meet as they wished, but their relationship had become more strained. Nothing stood in the way of their happiness; he could come and see her whenever he liked, using the back staircase so that no one would notice him. The apartment was theirs; he could have slept there if he’d had the effrontery to do so. What caused them to feel so ill at ease with each other and created an insuperable barrier between them was the thought of his failure to accomplish the one thing they both wanted, the thing they had agreed upon and which remained undone. Jacques chided himself for his timidity. Each time he came to see Séverine she was more depressed; she had grown sick of this futile waiting. They no longer attempted to kiss; there was no more to be gained from only half belonging to each other. The happiness they sought lay elsewhere — in another world across the sea, where they could marry and lead a new life.