The Beast Within - Emile Zola [164]
In the dark, Philomène sensed Séverine gently squeezing Jacques’s arm at the thought of their being together. She left them and went back to her house. She had only walked a few paces when she stopped, turned round and hid herself in the shadows. It moved her to know that they were together. She felt no jealousy; she simply wished she could love and be loved like them.
With every day that went by, Jacques was becoming more and more depressed. On two occasions when he could have seen Séverine he had invented excuses not to. The fact that he sometimes stayed so long at the Sauvagnats was also in order to avoid seeing her. He still loved her; indeed the longer his love remained unfulfilled, the stronger it grew. But now, whenever she took him in her arms, he felt his fearful malady returning. His head began to spin, and he would quickly draw away from her, frozen with terror; he felt as if he were no longer himself and that the beast was about to seize him in its jaws. He had tried to exhaust himself by driving the long-distance trains, asking to work overtime and standing on a lurching footplate for twelve hours at a stretch in the teeth of the gale. The other drivers all grumbled about what a hard job it was; they said it would finish a man off in twenty years. Jacques wished he could be finished off straight away. He couldn’t do enough to tire himself out; he was only happy when he was being swept along on La Lison, with nothing else to think about, staring ahead on the lookout for signals. At the end of a journey he would collapse on to his bed before he had even had time to wash himself. But the minute he woke up, his obsession returned to torment him. Once more he tried to devote himself to La Lison, spending hours cleaning her and making Pecqueux polish the metalwork until it shone like silver. Inspectors who travelled on the footplate with him always congratulated him. But Jacques shook his head; he knew there was something wrong. Ever since they had been caught in the snow, La Lison had not been the sturdy, reliable engine she used to be. The pistons and valve gear had been repaired, but she had lost something of her soul, that mysterious perfection of balance and timing which certain locomotives acquire, as if by magic, when they are first assembled. It distressed him; her poor performance led to bitter complaints and unreasonable requests to his superiors for pointless repairs and impractical improvements. They were all refused. Jacques became more and more despondent, convinced that there was something seriously wrong with La Lison and that she would never run properly again. His feelings towards her had changed. Why bother to look after her? Whatever he loved he destroyed! He now loved her with a fierce, desperate passion that neither anguish nor weariness could assuage.
Séverine had noticed the change in him. It saddened her; she thought he must be upset because of her, because of what she had told him. When he shuddered in her arms and suddenly turned away from her kiss, she thought it must be that he remembered the murder and that she horrified him. She hadn’t dared mention it again and regretted ever having spoken of it. It amazed her to think how she had come to confess to him as they lay together in a strange bed, burning with passion. She could no longer remember how urgent then was her need to confide; she was simply happy to have him with her, knowing that he shared her secret. She certainly loved him and desired him more than ever, now that he knew everything. Her passion was insatiable. She was at last a woman roused; she wished to be taken and embraced, to love, not as a mother, but as a lover. Jacques meant everything to her, and she spoke no more than the truth when she told him how she longed to melt into him, for it was her cherished dream that he might take her and keep her as a part of his own body. She remained the quiet, gentle woman she had always been. Her only pleasure came from Jacques; she wished she could have curled up like a