The Beast Within - Emile Zola [121]
A woman was screaming and wailing. She was being beaten. A man’s voice was yelling abuse at her.
‘Did you hear that? He’s giving her a real hiding! She’s thirty-two years old, but if he catches her at it he thrashes her like a little girl! Ah well, too bad! I’m keeping out of it. He’s her brother after all!’
‘But I thought he didn’t mind you going to see her,’ said Jacques. ‘I thought it was only when she was with other men that he got angry with her.’
‘Who knows?’ said Pecqueux. ‘Sometimes he pretends not to see me. Other times, he beats her up. Listen to him now! The funny thing is that he still loves her. He’d give up everything rather than be parted from her. But he expects good behaviour. Heavens above! She’s getting the full treatment tonight!’
The screams subsided and were replaced by a series of long, pathetic moans. The two men walked away. Ten minutes later they were fast asleep side by side in their little bedroom with its yellow painted walls, its four chairs, a table and a metal wash-basin, which they shared.
During the following weeks, the nights when Jacques and Séverine met were nights of untold bliss. They did not always have a storm to protect them. On starry nights or when the moon was full, they felt uneasy and would look for pockets of shadow and little dark corners where they could happily hold each other close. All through August and September there were some wonderful nights, so mild that they would have lain asleep in each other’s arms till daybreak, had they not been woken by sounds from the station as it began to stir and by locomotives letting off steam in the distance. Even in October, when it began to turn chilly, it did not bother them. Séverine came more warmly dressed, wrapped in a big coat, almost big enough for Jacques to squeeze into too. They would barricade themselves in the tool-shed, which they had found a way of locking from the inside with the help of an iron bar, and there they felt safe and snug. The fierce November gales might be blowing slates from the rooftops, but they felt not the slightest draught. Jacques, however, ever since the night he had first made love to her, had wanted to possess her in her own home, in her poky little apartment, where she seemed different, more desirable, a respectable married woman quietly going about her daily business. She had always refused, not so much because of her prying neighbours as from a lingering sense of propriety. She could not bring herself to sleep with him in her own marriage bed. One Monday, however, in broad daylight, when Jacques had come for lunch and Roubaud was late back, having had to see the stationmaster, he picked her up and carried her across to the bed for a joke. It was such a mad, foolhardy thing to do, and they were both beside themselves laughing. Needless to say, they very soon became carried away. After that she offered no further resistance and Jacques came to meet her in her apartment after midnight on Thursdays and Saturdays. It was terribly risky, and they hardly dared move in case the neighbours heard them, but this only redoubled their passion and added to their pleasure. Often they felt a desire to walk abroad in the dark, to escape like caged animals, into the icy stillness of a winter’s night. Once they made love beneath the stars in the middle of a bitter December frost.
They had been living like this for four months, their love for each other growing stronger and stronger. To both of them love was something new. At heart they were still children, young innocents, amazed at falling in love for the first time, happy simply to be in each other’s arms, each submitting to the other’s will in a perpetual contest of self-sacrifice and surrender. Jacques was in no doubt that Séverine had cured him of the terrible malady he had inherited as a child; since he had possessed her the thought of murder no longer troubled him. Did physical possession satisfy the craving to kill? Was possession tantamount to killing? Who could fathom the shadowy mind of the beast within?