The Beast Within - Emile Zola [130]
Never had Jacques felt the cold cut through him like this. His face was pricked by thousands of icy needles, and he felt as if it were covered in blood. He had lost all sensation in his hands; they were stiff with cold and, to his dismay, so numb that he could no longer feel the reversing wheel that he was holding. When he reached up to sound the whistle, his arm hung heavily from his shoulder like the arm of a dead man. His stomach heaved; he could not tell whether his legs were continuing to support him or not as he was flung violently backwards and forwards by the continual lurching of the engine. He was overcome with fatigue, and the cold was beginning to affect his brain; he had the frightening sensation of not knowing whether he was really there or not, whether this was him driving the engine, for he was operating the reversing wheel automatically and simply gazing at the falling pressure gauge as if he were in a trance. All the old stories about drivers having hallucinations kept going through his head. Was that a fallen tree across the track in front of him? Was there a red flag waving from the top of that bush? Were those not detonators he could hear repeatedly going off above the noise of the wheels? He could no longer tell; he kept telling himself he should stop but he simply lacked the will-power to do so. This agony of mind lasted several minutes. He suddenly caught sight of Pecqueux, who had once again fallen asleep over the toolbox, worn out by the cold like himself. It made him so angry that for a moment he felt almost warm again.
‘You useless bastard!’ he screamed.
Jacques was normally very tolerant of his companion’s drunken habits, but he started kicking him to wake him up and didn’t desist until he was on his feet. Pecqueux, still in a daze, merely grunted and picked up his shovel.
‘All right, all right,’ he said, ‘I’m seeing to it!’
When he had mended the fire, the pressure rose again, and in the nick of time, for La Lison had just entered a cutting where there was more than a metre of snow to get through. Jacques was trying to get the maximum effort from her and she was shaking all over. For a moment she appeared to lose strength and seemed about to grind to a halt, like a ship caught on a sandbank. What was adding to her burden was the heavy layer of snow that had gradually accumulated on the carriage roofs. The dark line of carriages was being drawn along through the snow, with a white blanket stretched over them, and where the snow had melted and run down the sides of La Lison’s boiler it looked as though she wore a black cloak trimmed with ermine. Once again, despite the great weight she was pulling, she managed to free herself and get through. Round a wide bend, high on an embankment, the train could still be seen, like a piece of dark ribbon, steadily making its way through this fairytale world of dazzling whiteness.
Further ahead, however, lay more cuttings. Jacques and Pecqeuex had felt La Lison beginning to struggle. They steeled themselves against the cold, standing at their post, determined to brave things out to the bitter end. Once again the engine began to lose speed. She had run between two banks of snow. Slowly but surely she came to a halt. It seemed as if she were stuck in glue, with all her wheels seized up, held fast and gasping for breath. She had stopped moving. It was all over. The snow held her powerless in its grip.
‘That’s it!’ cursed Jacques. ‘We’ve had it!’
He stood at the controls, his hand on the reversing wheel, trying every device he knew to see if the obstruction would give way. La Lison coughed and choked in vain; eventually Jacques closed the regulator and swore out loud. He was furious.
The principal guard leaned out of the door of his van and, seeing Pecqueux on the footplate, called out, ‘That