Jacques fled in the melancholy night. He ascended at full speed a path on the hillside, which brought him down to a little dale. The stones he scattered beneath his feet, alarmed him, and he tore off to the left among the bushes, there he bent round to the right, and came to a bare plateau. Abruptly descending from the high ground, he fell into the hedge bordering the line; a train flew along, roaring and flaming. At first he failed to understand what it could be, and felt terrified. Ah! yes, all this multitude that was passing, the continual flood, while he stood there in anguish!
He started off once more, climbing the hill and descending again. He now constantly encountered the railway line, either at the bottom of deep cuttings, resembling unfathomable depths, or else on embankments that shut out the horizon with gigantic barricades. This desert country, broken up into hillocks, was like a labyrinth without issue, where he, in his folly, wheeled round and round in the mournful desolation of the fallow land. And he had been beating up and down the inclines a long time, when before him he perceived the round opening, the black jaw of the tunnel. An up-train plunged into it, howling and whistling, leaving behind, when it had disappeared, absorbed by the earth, a prolonged concussion that made the ground quake.
Then, Jacques, with weary feet fell down beside the line; and, grovelling on the ground, his face buried in the long grass, he burst into convulsive sobs. Great God! So this abominable complaint of which he fancied himself cured, had returned! He had wanted to murder that girl. Kill a woman, kill a woman! This had been ringing in his ears from his earliest youth. He could not deny that he had taken the scissors to stab her. And it was not because she had resisted his embrace. No; it was for the pleasure of the thing, because he had a desire to do so, such a strong desire, that if he had not clutched the grass, he would have returned there, as fast as he could, to butcher her. Her, great God! That Flore whom he had seen grow up, that wild child by whom he had just felt himself so fondly loved! His twisted fingers tore the ground, his sobs rent his throat in a horrifying rattle of despair.
Nevertheless, he did his utmost to become calm. He wanted to understand it all. When he compared himself with others, how did he differ from them? Down there at Plassans, in his youth, he had frequently asked himself the same question. It is true that his mother Gervaise was very young at the time of his birth, barely fifteen and a half; but he was the second. She had only just entered her fourteenth year when his elder brother Claude made his appearance; and neither Claude nor Etienne, who came later, seemed to suffer from having such a child for a mother, or a father as young as herself—that handsome Lantier, whose heartlessness was to cost Gervaise so many tears. Perhaps his two brothers also had his complaint, and said nothing about it. Particularly the elder one, who was dying with such incensement to become painter, that people said he had gone half crazy over his genius.
The family was not at all right, several of its members were wrong in the head. Himself, at certain hours, felt this hereditary flaw. Not that he had bad health, for it was only the apprehension and shame of his attacks that formerly had made him thin. But he was apt to suddenly lose his equilibrium, as if there existed broken places, holes in his being, by which his own self escaped from him amidst a sort of great cloud of smoke that disfigured everything. Then, losing his self-control, he obeyed his muscles, listening to the mad animal within him. Nevertheless, he did not drink, he even deprived himself of an occasional dram of brandy, having remarked that the least drop of alcohol drove him mad. And he began to think that he must be paying for others, the fathers, the grandfathers who had drunk, the generations of drunkards, whose vitiated blood he had inherited. It seemed like slow poison, which reduced him to savagery, taking him back to the depths of the woods, among the wolves, devourers of women.
Jacques had raised himself on an elbow, reflecting, watching the dark entrance to the tunnel. Heaving another great sob, he sank down again, rolling his head on the ground, crying out with grief. That girl, that girl he had wanted to kill! The incident returned to him, acute and frightful, as if the scissors had penetrated his own flesh.
No reasoning appeased him. He had wanted to kill her, he would kill her now, if she happened to be there. He remembered the first time the complaint had shown itself. He was barely sixteen, and one evening, while playing with a young girl, a relative, his junior by a couple of years, she happened to fall, and he at once sprang at her. In the following year he recollected sharpening a knife to bury it in the neck of another girl, a little blonde, whom he noticed pass before his door every morning. This one had a very fat, rosy neck, and he had already selected the place, a beauty spot under one of the ears. Then, there were others, and others still, quite a procession of nightmares, all those whom he had glanced at, with an abrupt desire to murder them. Women he had brushed against in the street, women whom accident made his neighbours, one particularly, a newly married bride seated beside him at the theatre, who laughed very loud, and from whom he had to run away in the middle of an act, so as not to rip her open.
As he did not know them, why was he so furious against them? For, each occasion, it seemed like a sudden outburst of blind rage, an ever-recurring thirst to avenge some very ancient offences, the exact recollection of which escaped him. Did it date from so far back, from the harm women had done to his race, from the rancour laid up from male to male since the first deceptions at the bottom of the caverns? And, in his access, he also felt the necessity to fight, in order to conquer and subjugate the female, the perverted necessity to throw her dead on his back, like a prey torn from others for ever. His head was bursting in the effort to understand. He could find no answer to his inquiry. Too ignorant, the brain too sluggish, thought he, in this anguish of a man urged to acts wherein his will stood for nothing, and the reason whereof had disappeared from his mind.
A train again passed by with the flash of its lights, and plunged like a thunderbolt that roars and expires, into the mouth of the tunnel; and Jacques, as if this anonymous, indifferent, and hasty crowd had been able to hear him, stood up, swallowing his sobs and taking an innocent attitude. How many times at the end of one of his attacks, had he started thus, like the guilty, at the least sound? He only lived tranquil and happy, when detached from the world on his locomotive. When the engine bore him along in the trepidation of its wheels at express speed, when he had his hand on the reversing-wheel, and was entirely engaged in watching the metals and looking out for the signals, he ceased thinking, and took deep draughts of the pure air, which always blew a gale. And this was why he was so fond of his engine.
On leaving the École des Arts et Métiers, he selected this occupation of engine-driver, notwithstanding his bright intelligence, for the solitude and distraction it gave him. Without ambition, having in four years attained the position of driver of the first class, he already earned 2,800 frcs. a year, which, coupled with the gratuities he received for economy in fuel and grease, brought the annual amount of his wages up to more than 4,000 frcs., and that satisfied him. He saw his comrades of the second and third class, those instructed by the company, the engine-fitters they took as pupils, he saw almost all of them marry work-girls, women who kept in the background, whom one only occasionally caught sight of at the hour of departure, when they brought the little baskets of provisions; while the ambitious comrades, particularly those who came from a school, waited until they were heads of depôts to get married, in the hope of meeting with someone of the middle class, a lady who wore a hat. For his part, he avoided women. What did he care? He would never marry. His only future was to roll along alone, to roll along always, always, without stay.