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By Root 1261 0

before getting married, in the hope that they might be able to find someone a bit better, a woman with class! But Jacques kept away from women altogether. He wasn’t interested in them. He knew he could never marry. The only future for him lay in driving his locomotive, alone, for mile upon mile, endlessly. Small wonder that his superiors held him up as an example to all the others; he didn’t drink and he didn’t chase women. In fact his excesses of good conduct had become something of a joke amongst his more boisterous companions. The only thing they found a little disturbing was when he was in one of his gloomy moods, not speaking, walking round with a vacant expression on his face and looking washed out. He rented a little room in the Rue Cardinet which looked out on to the Batignolles engine shed, where his locomotive was stationed. Every minute of his free time, hour after hour, he remembered, he had spent in this room, like a monk immured in his cell, lying on his stomach, attempting to drown his wayward desires in sleep!

Jacques tried to drag himself to his feet. What was he doing sitting outside on the grass on a cold misty night in the middle of winter? The countryside lay in darkness. The only light came from the sky. A fine mist was spread across it like a vast dome of frosted glass, suffused by a pale yellow glow from the moon which lay hidden from view behind it. The black horizon lay stretched out as silent and still as a corpse. It must be nearly nine o’clock, he thought to himself. The best thing to do would be to go back to the house and get some sleep. As if in a daze, he saw himself opening the door, climbing the stairs to the attic and lying down on the straw next to Flore’s bedroom with only a wooden dividing wall between them. She would be there. He would hear her breathing. He even knew that she always slept with the door open and that nothing could prevent him from walking into her room. Once more he began to shake violently. He saw her lying there undressed, her body spread out, warm from sleep, defenceless. Weeping uncontrollably, he fell back to the ground. He had wanted to kill her! He had wanted to kill her! He was gasping for breath. He shuddered at the thought that within minutes from now, if he went back to the house, he would go and kill her in her bed. Not having a weapon wouldn’t prevent him. Try as he might to bury his head in his hands and make it all go away, he knew that the male within him, no matter how hard he resisted, would push open the door and strangle her in her bed, goaded by its born instinct to rape, by its overwhelming need to avenge the wrong inflicted on it since the world began. No, he must not go back to the house. He must stay out there tramping the fields! He leaped to his feet and began to run.

For half an hour he chased frantically through the darkened countryside, fleeing before the horrors in his mind, like the quarry pursued by a snarling pack of hounds. He ran up hills and down steep-sided ravines, never stopping. He waded two streams which crossed his path, waist-deep in water. His way was barred by a clump of trees. How would he get through? His one thought was to keep moving forward in a straight line, on and on, to escape from himself, to escape from the beast, from the creature that dwelled within him. But to no avail; the creature ran as fast as he did; he carried it with him wherever he went. For the last seven months he had thought he had got rid of it; things had begun to return to normal. But now it was about to start again; his life would once more become a constant battle with himself, lest the beast should leap out at the first woman who happened to come near him. Fortunately, the vast stillness of the countryside, the great emptiness that surrounded him brought some solace to his troubled thoughts; he found himself imagining a life as silent and empty as this desolate landscape, through which he might walk for ever, without meeting a soul. He must have come round in a big circle without realizing it, scrambling about in the dense undergrowth above