Complete Works of Emile Zola (1076 page)

What astonished Jacques was the frequent absence of Séverine from the room. On the first day, in obedience to the orders of the doctor, she had said nothing about Henri being below, feeling that the idea of absolute solitude would act as a sort of soothing draught on her patient “We are alone here, are we not?” he inquired.

“Yes, my darling, alone, all alone,” she answered. “You can sleep in peace.”

But she disappeared at every moment, and the next day he overheard footsteps and whispering on the ground floor. Then, on the following day, he distinguished a lot of stifled merriment, bursts of clear laughter, two fresh, youthful voices that never ceased.

“What is it? Who is there?” he asked. “So we are; not alone?”

“Well, no, my darling,” she replied. “Down below, just under your room, is another injured man to whom I have given hospitality.”

“Ah!” he exclaimed. “Who is it?”

“Henri, you know, the headguard!” said she.

“Henri! Ah!” he exclaimed again.

“And this morning,” she continued, “his two sisters arrived. It is they that you hear; they laugh at everything. As he is much better they are going back again to-night, on account of their father who cannot do without them; and Henri is to remain two or three days longer to get quite well. Just fancy, he leapt from the train without breaking a single bone; only he was like an idiot; but his reason has returned.”

Jacques made no remark, but he fixed such a penetrating look on her, that she added: —

“You understand, eh? If he was not there, people might gossip about us two. So long as I am not alone with you, my husband can say nothing and I have a good pretext for remaining here. You understand?”

“Yes, yes,” he replied; “that is all right.”

And Jacques, until evening, listened to the laughter of the little Dauvergnes, which he recollected having heard in Paris, ascending in the same manner from the lower floor into the room where Séverine had made her confession to him. With darkness came silence, and he could only distinguish the light footsteps of Séverine going from him to the other wounded man. The door below closed, and the house fell into profound silence. Feeling thirsty, he had to knock twice on the floor with a chair for her to come up to him. When she arrived, she was all smiles and very assiduous, explaining that she could not get away before because it was necessary to keep a compress of cold water on the head of Henri.

On the fourth day, Jacques was able to get up, and pass a couple of hours in an armchair before the window. By bending forward a little he could see the strip of garden inclosed by a low wall and invaded by briars with their pale bloom, a slice of which had been taken by the railway. And he remembered the night when he stood on tip-toe to look over the wall. He again saw the rather large piece of ground at the back of the house shut in by a hedge only, the hedge he had gone through to run up against Flore seated at the entrance to the dilapidated greenhouse, cutting up stolen cord with scissors. Ah! that abominable night full of the terror of his complaint! That Flore, with the tall, supple stature of a fair warrior woman, her flaming eyes fixed straight on his, was ever present since the recollection of it all returned to him more and more distinctly.

At first he had not opened his lips respecting the accident, and no one about him alluded to it, out of prudence. But every detail came back to him, and he pieced it all together again. He thought of nothing else, and his mind was so continuously occupied with the subject, that now, at the window, his sole occupation consisted in looking for traces of the collision, in watching for the actors in the catastrophe. How was it that he did not see Flore there at her post as gatekeeper with her flag in her fist? He dared not ask the question, and this increased the uneasiness he felt in this lugubrious dwelling, which seemed to him to be peopled with spectres.

Nevertheless, one morning, when Cabuche was there assisting Séverine, he ended by making up his mind.

“And where is Flore?” he inquired. “Is she ill?”

The quarryman, taken unawares, misunderstood a gesture the young woman made, and, thinking she was telling him to speak out, he answered:

“Poor Flore is dead.”

Jacques looked at them shuddering, and it then became necessary to tell him all. Together they related to him the suicide of the young girl, how she had been cut in two in the tunnel. The burial of the mother had been delayed until the evening, so that her daughter might be carried away at the same time; and they now slept side by side in the little cemetery at Doinville, where they had gone to join the first who had made the journey, the younger sister, that gentle but unfortunate Louisette. Three miserable creatures among those who fall on the road, who are crushed and disappear, as if swept away by the terrible blast of those passing trains.

“Dead! great God!” repeated Jacques very lowly. “My poor Aunt Phasie, and Flore, and Louisette!”

At the last name, Cabuche, who was assisting Séverine to push the bed, instinctively raised his eyes to her, troubled at the recollection of his tender feelings for another in presence of the budding passion which he felt had gained him; he, a soft-hearted creature of limited intelligence, was without defence, like an affectionate dog who is conquered by the first caress. But Séverine who knew all about his tragic love episode remained grave, looking at him with sympathetic eyes, so that he felt very much touched; and his hand having unintentionally grazed her hand, as he was passing her the pillows, he felt like suffocating, and it was in a stammering voice that he replied to the next question Jacques put to him.

“Did they accuse her, then, of causing the accident?” asked the latter.

“Oh! no, no! Only it was her fault, you understand?” answered Cabuche.

In disjointed sentences he related all he knew. For his own part, he had seen nothing as he was in the house when the horses moved on to drag the stone dray across the line. This, indeed, was what caused him silent remorse. The judicial gentlemen had harshly reproached him with leaving his team. The frightful misfortune would not have occurred had he remained with them. The inquiry, therefore, resulted in showing that there had been simple negligence on the part of Flore; and as she had punished herself atrociously, nothing further was done. The company did not even remove Misard, who, with his air of humility and deference, had got out of the scrape by accusing the dead girl: she always did as she liked; he had to leave his box at every minute to close the gate. The company, for their part, were compelled to recognise that on this particular morning he had performed his duty perfectly. And, in the interval that would elapse before he married again, they had just authorised him to take as gatekeeper an old woman of the neighbourhood, named Ducloux, formerly a servant at an inn, who lived on money she had economised in her younger days.

When Cabuche left the room, Jacques detained Séverine by a glance. He looked extremely pale.

“You know very well that it was Flore who pulled on the horses, and barred the line with the blocks of stone,” said he. Séverine in her turn grew pallid.

“Darling, what on earth are you saying?” she answered. “You are getting feverish; you must go to bed again.”

“No, no, I am not wandering. Do you hear? I saw her, as I see you,” he continued. “She held the cattle, and with her firm fist, prevented the dray advancing.”

On hearing this, Séverine, losing her legs, sank down on a chair opposite him.

“Good heavens! good heavens!” she exclaimed. “It strikes terror into one. It is monstrous. I shall never be able to get any sleep.”

“Of course,” he resumed, “the thing is clear. She attempted to kill us both in the general slaughter. She had been making me advances for a long time, and she was jealous. Coupled with this, she was half off her head, and had all manner of rum ideas. Only think such a number of murders at one stroke — quite a multitude plunged in gore! Ah! the wretch!”

His eyes grew wide open, a nervous twitch drew down his lip, and he held his tongue. They remained looking at one another for fully a minute without speaking. Then, tearing himself from the abominable vision that had risen up between them, he continued in a lower tone:

“Ah! she is dead! So that is why her ghost is here!

Since I recovered consciousness she seems to be always present. Again this morning, I turned round thinking her at the head of my bed. Still she is dead, and we are alive. Let us hope she will not avenge herself now!”

Séverine shuddered.

“Hold your tongue, hold your tongue!” said she. “You will drive me crazy.”

She left the room, and he heard her go downstairs to the other invalid.

Jacques, who had remained at the window, was again lost in the contemplation of the line, of the small habitation of the gatekeeper, with its great well, of the signal-box, that wooden hut where Misard seemed to be dozing over his regular, monotonous work. Jacques became absorbed by these things now for hours, as if poring over some problem he could not solve, and the solution of which, nevertheless, concerned his safety.

He never felt tired of watching Misard, that puny creature, gentle and pallid, everlastingly disturbed by a nasty little cough, who had poisoned his wife, who had got the better of that strapping woman, like a rodent insect obstinately pursuing its passion. He could certainly not have had any other idea in his head for years, day and night, during the twelve interminable hours he remained on duty. At each electric tinkle, announcing a train, he blew the horn; then, when the train had passed and he had blocked the line, he pressed an electric knob to warn the next signalman of its arrival, afterwards touching a second knob to open the line at the preceding signal-box. These simple mechanical movements had, in the end, entered into his vegetative life, as bodily habits.

Untutored and obtuse he never read anything, but between the calls of his apparatus remained with his arms hanging down beside him, and his eyes gazing vaguely into space. Being almost always seated in his box, he had no other diversion than that of dawdling as long as possible over his lunch. When this was finished he fell into his doltishness again with a skull quite empty, without a thought; and he was particularly tormented with terrible drowsiness, sometimes sleeping with his eyes open. At night-time, if he wished to avoid giving way to this irresistible torpor, he had to get up and walk with unsteady legs like a drunken man. And it was thus that the struggle with his wife, that secret combat as to who should have the concealed 1,000 frcs. after the death of the other, must for months and months have been the sole reflection in the benumbed brain of this solitary being.

When he blew his horn; when he manoeuvred his signals, watching in automatic fashion over the safety of so many lives, he thought of the poison; and when he waited with idle arms, his eyes moving from side to side with sleep, he still thought of it. Of nothing did he think but that: he would kill her, he would search, it was he who would have the money.

At present, Jacques was astonished to find Misard had not changed. It was possible then to kill without any trouble, and life continue as before. After the feverishness, attending the first rummages for the money-bag, he had just resumed his usual indifference, the cunning, gentle manner of a feeble being who shunned a shock. As a matter of fact, he might well have put an end to his wife, but she triumphed notwithstanding; for he was beaten. He had turned the house upside down without discovering anything, not a centime; and his looks alone, those anxious ferreting looks, revealed on his sallow countenance how busy was his mind.

Everlastingly he saw the wide open eyes of the dead woman, the hideous smile on her lips which seemed to repeat: “Search! search!” He sought. He could not give his brain one minute of rest now. It worked, worked incessantly in quest of the spot where the treasure was buried, thinking over the possible hiding-places, rejecting those where he had already rummaged, bursting into feverish excitement as soon as he imagined a new one; and then, burning with such haste, that he abandoned everything to run off there to no purpose. This, in the end, became an intolerable torment, an avenging torture, a sort of cerebral insomnia which kept him awake, stupid and reflecting in spite of himself, in the tic-tac of the pendulum of his fixed idea.

When he blew his horn, once for the down-trains, twice for the-up trains, he sought; when he answered the ringing, when he pressed the knobs of his apparatus, closing, opening the line, he sought. He sought, sought, bewilderingly, ceaselessly. In the daytime, during the long period of waiting, heavy with idleness; at night, tormented with sleep as if exiled to the other end of the world, in the silence of the great black country. And the woman Ducloux, who at present looked after the gate, actuated by the desire to become his wife, showed him every possible attention, and was alarmed to see that he never closed his eyes.

One night, Jacques, who began to take a few steps in his room, had got up and approaching the window, saw a lantern moving to and fro at the house of Misard: assuredly the man was searching. But the following night, the convalescent being again on the look out, was astounded to recognise a great dark form, which proved none other than Cabuche, who was standing in the road beneath the window of the adjoining room where Séverine slept. And this sight, without him being able to understand why it should be so, instead of irritating him, filled him with commiseration and sadness: another unfortunate fellow, this great brute, planted there like a bewildered faithful animal.

In truth, Séverine, who was so slim and not handsome, when examined in detail, must possess a very powerful charm with her raven hair and deep blue eyes for even savages, giants of limited intelligence, to be so smitten with her as to pass the night at her door, like little trembling youths!

He recalled certain things that he had noticed: the eagerness of the quarryman to assist her, and the look of servility with which he offered his help. Yes, Cabuche was certainly in love with her. And Jacques, having kept his eye on him, the next day noticed him furtively pick up a hair-pin that had fallen from her hair as she made the bed, and keep it in his closed hand so as not to restore it. Jacques thought of his own torment, of all he had suffered through his love, of all the trouble and fright returning with health.