The Beast Within - Emile Zola [105]
‘There’s plenty of time before the train leaves,’ she said to herself. ‘I’m going to buy myself a nice meal.’
Outside the station she chose the most expensive-looking restaurant. She installed herself at a table for one with a spotless white tablecloth in front of the plate glass window and sat watching the activity on the street outside. She ordered herself a choice meal of oysters, fillet of sole and roast wing of chicken. At least it made up for her dreadful lunch. She ate with relish. The pain de gruau was exquisite, and to finish she treated herself to a plate of beignets soufflés.5By the time she had drunk her coffee she had only a few minutes left to catch the train. She quickly made her way towards the station.
Upon leaving her, Jacques had returned to his room to change into his working clothes and had then gone back to the engine shed. Normally he arrived there only half an hour before his locomotive was due to leave. He had come to rely on his fireman, Pecqueux, to get the engine ready, even though he was more often than not drunk. Today, however, perhaps because of the emotional state he was in, he felt he needed to check for himself that everything was in proper working order, particularly as on the way down from Le Havre he had sensed that the engine was not working as efficiently as it should have been.
Inside the vast engine shed, black with soot and lit by grimy windows high up in the roof, Jacques’s locomotive, surrounded by other engines standing idle near by, was waiting near the entrance ready to leave. One of the shed firemen had just finished stoking the firebox; red-hot cinders dropped from beneath the engine into the ash-pit below. The engine was a four-coupled express locomotive of imposing yet delicate beauty. Its finely wrought driving wheels were linked by steel coupling-rods. It was a broad-chested, long-limbed, powerful machine,6 yet possessed all the logic and mechanical certainty which constitutes the sovereign beauty of these creatures of shining steel. Precision coupled with strength! Along with the Western Railway Company’s other locomotives, it carried both a number and a name, the name of one of the Company’s stations, Lison, a town in the Cotentin. Jacques affectionately referred to his engine as La Lison, as if it were a woman, because he was so attached to it.
It was true: he had been driving this locomotive for four years and he had fallen in love with it. He had driven many other locomotives. Some were easy to handle and some were awkward, some worked hard and some were useless. He had come to realize that they all had their own individual characters and that many of them, as might be said of many women, left much to be desired. The fact that he loved La Lison was a sure sign that it possessed all the best qualities he could ever hope to find in a woman. It was gentle and responsive. Thanks to its excellent steaming capacity, it was easy to handle, steady and reliable. When it pulled out of a station so effortlessly, some said it was simply because its wheel tyres gave it a good grip on the rails or because the slide valves had been so finely adjusted. Similarly, they attributed the fact that it steamed so well on so little coal to the quality of the copper in the boiler tubes and the carefully calculated dimensions of the boiler. But Jacques knew that there was more to it than this, because other locomotives of identical construction, which had been assembled with just the same care and attention, displayed none of these qualities. It was something impossible to define, something special about the way it had been built, about the way the metal had been hammered into place or the fitter’s hand had lined up the various parts: the locomotive had a personality, a life of its own.
So Jacques loved La Lison; she responded so willingly to his command. He felt grateful to her as a man might feel grateful to a mettlesome horse that always does as it is bidden. He loved it too because, as well as providing him with his regular wage, it also enabled